Project:News/Newsletter 2008-04

Betawiki Newsletter - April 2008
Hello, dear Betawiki user.

You are one of almost 600 people receiving this e-mail because you have registered with Betawiki, the wiki for the localisation projects of MediaWiki and Freecol.

This is our first e-mail newsletter. It was sent to all Betawiki users that have a confirmed e-mail address. This newsletter will be sent at most once every month (12 e-mails per year). It intends to keep you updated on Betawiki's developments, and is also aimed at reminding you to visit the project at least once every month to update the language(s) you have been contributing to in the past, so that the localisations will stay up to date.

Noteworthy events

 * Nikerabbit gets a Summer Coding project job to improve Translate functionality in MediaWiki. This is very exciting stuff and we will inform you about this in more detail in the next newsletter.
 * The Betawiki language project has caused a boost in the localisation level of many languages from India. We still have a lot of bounties available for languages like Afar, Hausa, Lingala, Swati, and dozens of other languages. In total, over 15.000 messages have been translated as part of this project.
 * MinuteElectron is working on a Babel extension. This should remove the need for creating hundreds of templates in wiki environments just to let other users know which languages you are able to speak. It is supposed to be backward compatible with the current Babel systems, so that information other than languages spoken can also be shared using local templates. Localisation of the extension will of course be supported in Betawiki.

Status overview

 * MediaWiki core messages: in the past month some 20 messages have changed. They have been tagged 'fuzzy' and need updating. A few dozen messages were added. The MediaWiki core now contains 1822 normal messages and 168 optional messages.
 * MediaWiki extensions: Currently 184 extension message groups are supported. In the past month, support for 14 new extensions was added. Support for 3 extensions was dropped. Betawiki supports almost every extension that is being maintained in the MediaWiki source code repository. Exceptions are SemanticMediaWiki (no standardised i18n support), FCKeditor (not/no longer maintained in MediaWiki subversion), Flagged Revisions (too unstable to keep up with). In total the supported MediaWiki extensions have 2908 normal messages, and 54 optional messages.
 * Freecol: Localisation of Freecol is continuing as normal. The current version of Freecol is 0.7.3, which was released 27 January. A few dozen messages have changed in the current development version. Updating is required.

Statistics
Unfortunately we cannot report on the localisation status of Freecol yet. This is something that will be worked on in the Summer coding project by Niklas Laxström.

Below you will find a comparison of the MediaWiki localisation status by end of year 2007 and the current status. We think is shows that MediaWiki localisation has taken a huge leap in the past three months. This is a good thing because it makes MediaWiki available in native langauges to many more literate native speakers, and we want to do better, still!x,y

We welcome feedback about this newsletter. Was it too compact/elaborate, was it informative enough, would you like to see other topics touched, etc. Please just let us know by sending a reply to this mail. We will try to accomodate your wishes.

Siebrand Mazeland Betawiki staff

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