On Saturday 28 January 2012 at 20:00 UTC there will be a workshop on Translation tools. It will take between 60 and 90 minutes and will consist of an introduction of use cases and features, as well as a Q&A. (local times)

The workshop will focus on the use cases covered by the Translate extension on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki for the following user roles:

• writers: those who write texts that need to be translated
• translation administrators: those who mark pages for translations and post-process translations when they have been made

Please put the following page on your watchlist and write your name down if you would like to attend. The workshop is held online using WebEx. I would advise you to log in 15 minutes in advance to ensure you have ample time to set up your computer if you have not used WebEx before. WebEx can be used in desktop environments on Linux, OSX and Windows.

If you would like to familiarise yourself with the technology before the workshop, please take a look at the elaborate documentation, which includes some tutorials. In the next two weeks, the already present documentation for translators will also be completed.

Credit goes to Pete Forsyth for proposing to have this workshop. Hope to see you online Saturday!

Siebrand Mazeland
Product Manager Localisation
Wikimedia Foundation

Video tutorials are often more beginner-friendly than text based online help pages. Wikimedia is therefore producing a number of videos demonstrating the basics of Wikipedia editing and increasing the public understanding of Wikipedia and Wikimedia.

On 19 November 2008 the shooting of the very first Wikipedia video tutorials took place. They will deal with two very basic questions:

* How do I edit Wikipedia?
* Why does Wikipedia work even though anyone can edit it?

To give you a look behind the scenes we produced a short 3 minute making-of video that can be watched online:

* on Wikimedia Commons (11.7 MB, better quality)
* on Wikimedia Commons (6.2 MB, lower quality)

and also

* on Vimeo
* on blip.tv
* on YouTube

Currently, the two video tutorials are in the process of post-production (assembling the film, adding visual effects etc.) and we hope that they will be online soon.  We’re also working on a portal space where the tutorials will be hosted for the long-term, and of course you’ll be able to find them here on the Wikimedia blog.

Frank Schulenburg
Head of Public Outreach<