User:Nike

I am Niklas Laxström, the founder of this wiki. I live in Finland. I was born in Vaasa, but nowadays I live in Helsinki. Despite my name, my native language is Finnish and I've learned Swedish in school.

I have a M.A. in language technology with minors in CS, Finnish and East Asian studies (of Japan). I've finished my master's thesis in July 2011, then I've submitted it in its final form and I've officially graduated on the 20th March 2012. Since 2014 I am doing PhD part-time.

I'm an experienced MediaWiki developer and a big fan of open source and open content. I have participated in many open source projects, mostly as a translator. My development computer is currently a ThinkPad X1 Carbon which is running Fedora with KDE.

I like walking and cycling outside – sometimes also gathering data for OpenStreetMap at the same time. I read books when I have time, which lately is not often. The truth is I spend most of my free time in front of my laptop programming, reading interesting stuff (like lwn.net), following MediaWiki development and so on. Sometimes I also take the time to relax and play some computer games (like Skyrim). Some things I have been doing and would like to more:
 * Learn more about machine learning and processing of large datasets
 * Develop applications for humanoid robots
 * Read all the unread books and magazines which have piled up
 * See translatewiki.net get even bigger!

In 2008, I participated in Summer of Code Finland with a project to improve the Translate extension which is the core of this site. Main deliverable in that project were framework for supporting different translation file formats, base work for wiki page translation feature and better statistics about translation activity.

In 2009, I participated in Google Summer of Code to again improve the Translate extension. During that project I improved administration tools, fixed known performance and scalability bottlenecks and implement new AJAX enhanced translation interface.

In 2010, the wiki page translation feature got huge boost in bug fixes and features when KDE UserBase started using it.

In 2011, I started working for the WMF in the Language Engineering team (previously called l10n team).

In 2012, Translate got more usage in WMF projects.

In 2013, many of the interface were redone in the Translate UX project by the Language Engineering team.

Short history of translatewiki.net
I started by participating in Finnish Wikipedia around summer 2004. Soon I became sysop there and started participating in development of MediaWiki, first by translating it to Finnish. Since then I've made myself comfortable with most of the code base and coded some small fixes and so-called deletion conflict, for example. My contributions have been biased to i18n in many ways. Somewhere in 2006 (?) I started to develop i18n tool in this testwiki. I have to thank Gangleri for testing and attracting translators back then. From summer (fall) 2006 I was six months doing my military service. In summer/fall 2007 this wiki got more active again thanks to Siebrand. The tool was now pretty mature and stand alone extension. Currently there is talk about moving MediaWiki translation to under Wikimedia Foundation's Incubator project. No concrete steps have been taken yet. This wiki also supports localization of FreeCol, open source game resembling Colonization programmed in Java. It hasn't been overly active, but it has contributed few translations to FreeCol. Currently there is no planned changes for it.

On Friday, 9th of November 2007, this wiki moved to virtual server hosting and got a new address, translatewiki.net. Since then, it has been maintained by Siebrand and me. See above for the summer of code projects in which I participated to improve this site. In fall 2010 we switched to the Vector skin. In 2011 we celebrated our sixth birthday along with a very successful translation rally.

User:Nemo_bis/History is supposed to cover the history in more depth and range.

Potential pet projects

 * Play around with ttmserver
 * Automatic repository management
 * Investigate cloudfare
 * Investigate incapsulate

Notepad

 * find . -size 2363c -delete

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