Project:News/Newsletter 2012-04

This month's subject: Business as usual

Hello, dear translatewiki.net user.

This is the http://translatewiki.net e-mail newsletter for April 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 translations for your favourite project!

Delay in getting translations for MediaWiki live on Wikimedia wikis
The Wikimedia Foundation changed its version control system from Subversion to Git. This has caused delays in the localisation update progress. We expect things to get back to the regular daily schedule this week, so that your translations are improving the user experience of the almost 500 million monthly users of Wikimedia sites within 24 hours again.

We also took the opportunity to update the scripts we use for supported products to be more consistent and more automated. We hope this will decrease the time staff members need to help you fix issues and allow us to make updates for all supported products more often.

Changes in supported products
Since the last newsletter, support for two products was added, and one product was unfortunately dropped:

New product support:
 * Wiktionary mobile. The messages are often similar to those in Wikipedia mobile;
 * OpenStreetMap editor Potlatch 2;
 * At least four new Mediawiki extensions are supported: Side Bar Menu, Hide Prefix, Semantic Title, Genderize.

Dropped products:
 * Support for NOCC, a webmail client, was dropped. The only maintainer indicated he was no longer able to support the product. No use in asking you to translate a product that is no longer being developed.

Prospect products:
 * waymarked trails, an OpenStreetMap related project. We expect this product to go live soon;
 * mailman, a mailing list server. There has been no update on the status since our last newsletter.

Furthermore, we have notified Wikipedia projects about upcoming namespace changes in MediaWiki. Some of these changes have been problematic in the past, and this time the Macedonian and Serbian communities vetoed the namespace changes and made a new proposal.

Other noteworthy mentions
We had two longer downtimes in March due to problems with the hardware our service runs on; our apologies, we hope our sponsor netcup.de can provide a more stable service in the time to come. We have also started monitoring the performance of the site more closely using MediaWiki's profiling facilities, and we have again made changes that should make the site more responsive.

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 4,800 receiving this mail only 3,656 people are registered as translator. You may want to finish the steps that will get you the status of translatewiki.net translator.

Siebrand Mazeland

Niklas Laxström

Translatewiki.net staff

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