Project:News/Newsletter 2012-05

This month's subject: New projects, small and large

Hello, dear translatewiki.net user.

This is the http://translatewiki.net e-mail newsletter for May 2012. It features news on MediaWiki localisation and changes in supported products. The success of open source software localisation relies on your continued involvement and enthusiasm, so please try and dedicate 15 minutes a week to updating and reviewing translations for your favourite project!

All translators can review translations
From now on, all translators can review translations made by other translators. For the past few months, we have experimented with this functionality, and we have found that it can mean a huge quality boost for currently available translations. Niklas has blogged about this feature back in March. Please use it, and let us know what you think.

Changes in supported products
Since the last newsletter, support for one new product was added, and support for other products was updated:

New product support:
 * Waymarked Trails is a service showing routes for hiking, cycling, mountain biking and inline skating around the world. Here is some praise from developer Guttorm Flatabø: "Within hours of putting up the beta translation pages, new translations were added, and within days new languages were 100% translated. We hope the translatewiki community also will visit and enjoy the Waymarked Trails service. The Waymarked Trails developers look forward to many quality translations that will make the service truly international."
 * 7 new Mediawiki extensions are supported: Akismet Klik, All Time Zones, Education Program, Page Triage, Select Tag, Wikidata Client and Wikidata Repo.
 * 2 new MediaWiki extensions for Wikia are supported: Search V2 and User Login.

Prospect products:
 * Mozilla Firefox: We are experimenting with adding support for localisation of the very popular web browser Firefox for a limited number of languages. Initially this will only be for Hebrew and Gujarati.

Status update on getting MediaWiki translations for MediaWiki on Wikimedia wikis
Early March 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation changed its version control system from Subversion to Git. This causes delays and breakage in the localisation update process for MediaWiki extensions up to today. Please know that we are working hard to get all known issues resolved, but the process is not completely under our control and very complex. Originally, we had added an explanation of the process here, but if you're really interested, please read it on-wiki. If you think the process is broken, please make sure to report it on our Support page, or create a new bug in bugzilla so that it can be seen and addressed by the right person(s) taking care of the responsible component. Always be sure to describe a precise observation (for instance, a translation you updated and you don't see on wiki after a few days, with links to diffs).

Other noteworthy mentions
In early May, we were experiencing regular crashes of MySQL. Eventually we found out that the cause was a shortage of inodes in our file system. Thanks to quick action of our server sponsor netcup.de, this issue was quickly resolved when diagnosed.

Arun Ganesh, who works at the Wikimedia Foundation as a User Interface Designer, is currently working on a usability analysis of the translation functionality. Based on the outcomes, we expect that we will be able to improve the workflow for translators further over the next few months.

If you are a developer of a promising Free and Open Source Software product and you are looking for a great community to localise your product, please get in touch with us! The same goes for those that wish to aid in developing the Translate extension further.

More detailed news can be found on our News page. Follow translatewiki on Twitter for the latest news.

We welcome feedback about this newsletter. Please let us know by sending a reply to this mail. We will try to accommodate your wishes.

Finally, of the 5,000 receiving this mail only 3,801 people are registered as translator. You may want to finish the steps that will get you the status of translatewiki.net translator.

Siebrand Mazeland

translatewiki.net staff

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