Project:News/Newsletter 2010-08

This month's subject: State of the message

Hello, dear translatewiki.net user.

This is our e-mail newsletter for August 2010. It intends to keep you updated on translatewiki.net's developments, and is also aimed at reminding you to visit http://translatewiki.net 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. Our last newsletter was sent many months ago, and we have a lot of news. We hope to inspire you to continue contributing to translatewiki.net. The project's success depends on your continued efforts. Follow translatewiki on Twitter for the latest news.

Greetings from KDE UserBase
For two years the Page Translation feature of the MediaWiki Translate extension has only been used at translatewiki.net. KDE UserBase is part of the user support system created for and by the KDE user community. It consists of mailing lists, a forum and a MediaWiki wiki. Since a few months ago, the user documentation for many pages there can be translated using the same process as on translatewiki.net. It is encouraging to see many new volunteer translators since the Translate extension was installed. We are very happy that our processes and software are being used there, and we hope it will help them grow a healthy community of translators, too!

New main page design
In the beginning of June we got ourselves a new main page - thanks go out to overyone who participated in creating it. The design is slicker, more optimised and aimed at getting prospect contributors to where they need to be as soon as possible. Aside from information about the projects we support, it also contains links to information about the interface, the technologies we use for online translation, that we are always looking for new and exciting projects to support, and of course that we need help with developing and managing the community website. While we were at it, we also removed items from the menu bar and did some reordering so you can more easily find your way. We hope translatewiki.net is now even more a place you will gladly send your friends to join our great community! The main page can of course be translated and has already been translated for 90% or more in 47 languages.

New product support
Support for the localisation of new projects and expansion of projects is one of the most important things we do. We think it grows our relevance as an open project and keeps the really, really active translators happy that would otherwise only have maintenance work on their existing translations. Since the last newsletter, the following projects were added:
 * Wikia is a very large free ad-based MediaWiki hosting service farm and we support the translation of 75 of their extensions.
 * The WikiReader brings the iconic Wikipedia to all generations.
 * Shapado is free and open source Questions & Answers software.
 * StatusNet is an open source microblogging server. Currently only the base project can be localised in translatewiki.net. StatusNet Inc. has pledged a grant for further development of our software that would enable it to localise the 40 plug-ins for StatusNet as well as fund a few hours of staff time every week for a year.
 * iHRIS is a suite of open source Human Resources Information System software. At the moment, only iHRIS Manage can be localised. Full support (three additional modules) is being developed and largely depends on the aforementioned StatusNet grant.

New features for translators
We have made improvements to the JavaScript enhanced translation interface. The translation dialogs load now more quickly, and every field in the dialog has a small arrow. You can use the arrow to insert your favorite starting point for translation and edit it for final translation. Finally, you can use keyboard shortcuts to activate the save, save and open next, skip to next and history actions. These enhancements let you work more quickly and more efficiently, and most important of all, let you enjoy translating. And oh, we also improved our translation memory: new translations are added into the translation memory almost instantly, instead of few times a day. There is also new task untranslated messages with suggestion from translation memory for those who want to take a flying start with easy messages.

Operational news

 * Documentation has been heavily improved for users, wiki operators and developers. Please help us improve documentation and software if you are willing and capable.
 * In January 2010 our hosting provider netcup.de has graciously provided us with a system upgrade to allow future expansion without sacrificing site performance.
 * In June 2010 we have invested a lot of time in improving memory usage, database performance and MediaWiki (extension) performance to improve our platform performance.
 * In August 2010 we have started using Nagios to monitor our services. We are looking into introducing reporting tools for trend watching.
 * A new privacy policy has been put in effect. It has been largely copied from the privacy policy of the Wikimedia Foundation and can be translated.
 * We are using the new talk page system LiquidThreads of all of our talk pages now, as well as on request and support pages. Even though LiquidThreads still has some issues, we think it is an enormous improvement over the old way of organising talk in a MediaWiki environment.
 * Since the last newsletter hundreds of new translators have requested translators rights and nearly a hundred thousand interface messages have been translated.
 * We are considering changing the default skin for translatewiki.net from Modern to Vector.

More detailed news can be found on our News page.

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

Siebrand Mazeland

Translatewiki.net staff

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