New Wikipedia Interface Rollout Continues

The User Experience team is continuing to work with the community to roll out the new Wikipedia interface.  As you may know, starting April 2010, we began introducing the new interface on Wikimedia sites.  We began with Wikimedia Commons and have since rolled out the interface to 10 Wikipedias.  In the next phase of the roll-out, we are planning to target as many of the remaining Wikipedia projects as we can.  The potential list is long (there are over 250 Wikipedia language editions), so we have a lot of work ahead of us. We are targeting June 30 for deployment.
We want to make sure that the Wikipedias that get the new interface are adequately translated before the features are introduced by default.  So we are doing a translation push to get the messages in the new interface translated in as many languages as possible.  Wikipedia language editions that have at least 80% of their user interface messages translated by June 28 will be included in the next phase of the roll-out.  As of today, there are approximately 60 Wikipedia language editions that meet that threshold. Wikipedia language editions that do not meet this translation threshold will get the new features in the final phase (currently scheduled for the end of July). The final phase will also include Wikimedia’s remaining sister projects.
We’ve created a landing page for people interested in helping with the roll-out.  There are four ways to help:

1. Become an Ambassador: During Phase III, volunteer Ambassadors helped coordinate the roll-out effort.  Responsibilities include coordinating the translation effort, consolidating feedback, communicating with the community, and serving as a liaison between the community and the Foundation.  These Ambassadors were very helpful and we encourage people to volunteer.
2. Translations:  We currently have approximately 80 languages that have not met the translation threshold.  We’ve reached out to the translation community to help with the translations, but we welcome anyone to join the effort
3. Identifying bugs:  The more eyes, the better! Identifying bugs on individual projects would be a huge help for our team.
4. General feedback: Your feedback is always appreciated.

We’re excited to continue rolling out the new interface to more projects and will keep everyone posted.  In the meantime, let us know what you think!

Howie Fung, User Experience

Update: On June 30, we deployed the new interface to 56 Wikipedia Projects.  We also included 27 “backstage” projects such as Meta and Mediawiki.org.  The list of projects may be found here.  Thanks to everyone for their help in making this rollout a success!