Project:News/Newsletter 2009-02

This month's subject: Keep up or perish - once you get there, the fun has only just begun

Hello, dear Betawiki user.

This is our e-mail newsletter for February 2009. 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.

Noteworthy events

In the last week of 2008 we had a translation rally. All translators that would contribute more than 500 translations to MediaWiki would share in a 1,000 Euro bounty. To our astonishment 35 users managed to reach this milestone. At the peak day, we got close to 10,000 contributions to translations. This was an absolute record. During the rally 28,790 new MediaWiki translations were contributed out of a total of 36,837 edits. Because of the success, we hope we will be able to repeat this rally again. For now, we do not have the funding yet to make it happen. Please let us know if you would be in a position to have us have one or two more rallys like this one.
2008 has been a great year for Translatewiki.net. The software has been improved, the number of supported products has been improved, and the volume of translations you have brought in has increased. Translatewiki.net's traffic doubled. We thank our hosting provider http://netcup.de for making this possible. In 2008 you created 376,989 new translations for all supported products, and some 140,000 additional changes and improvements were made to messages.
A new year brings new standards. For MediaWiki localisation this means that the group with the most often used messages has been updated. Especially for languages that only have this group translated, the percentage translated has dropped over 20%. Keep up or perish - once you get there, the fun has only just begun. Localisation is a continued effort, as software keeps on evolving.
With the Wikimedia Foundation getting a grant from the Stanton Foundation to improve the usability for the English language Wikipedia, we expect a lot of additional system messages to be created. This is a great thing for MediaWiki, but if the messages are not translated, speakers of other languages will be subjected to wresting through an incompletely translated user interface. So please do not stop translating. You will be more effective spending an hour on Translatewiki.net every week, than you will be spending half a day every month. Ideally you make room for some translating in your weekly schedule. Remember: Translatewiki.net is the ultimate collaborative localisation platform on the Internet. If you have online friends that speak the same language, invite them to join you in translating; it will even make it more fun. We provide you will all kinds of statistics that will enable you to make a game out of almost anything. Play catch up with another language, make more edits than your friend or foe, find messages that require improvement. Everything you do on localisation and internationalisation will make the product you use so much better.
The Betawiki name will slowly vanish from our screen. The wiki originally started out as Betawiki on a domain name that had no relation to its name. When Translatewiki.net moved to its own domain name, no "betawiki" domain names were available, leading to the registration of Translatewiki.net. To avoid confusion, we will be branding the wiki "Translatewiki.net" more and more from now on.
The Wikimedia Commons Java based upload tool Commonist is available for translation. We are in contact with toolserver.org administrators to design and implement toolserver wide localisation for tools, which we expect will give usability and usage of toolserver.org tools a boost. We hope to be able to provide more details in the next newsletter. Furthermore we are on the lookout for new and exciting products that you can translate. Products that have made some name for itself, but that could use the extra help with localisation - something the users of Translatewiki.net gladly do.
More detailed news is available on-wiki.

Status overview

MediaWiki core messages: 53 core messages were added since the last update bringing the total to to 2,226. There are now 186 (+9) optional messages. MediaWiki 1.14 is in the release candidate stage. This is the time to complete your localisation for the quarterly release.
MediaWiki extensions: Currently Translatewiki.net supports 282 MediaWiki extensions, which is an increase of 8 since the last update. In total the supported MediaWiki extensions have 6,407 (+433) normal messages, and 147 (+12) optional messages.
MantisBT: Localisation of MantisBT is still growing. In the last update we stated that an effort would be made to get previous 'off-line' translators to Translatewiki.net. This effort has not yet been made, but should be made soon. Current message volume is 1,178 (+2) normal messages and 7 (+1) optional messages.
FreeCol: Localisation of FreeCol is continuing as normal, support for more languages is progressing steadily. FreeCol 0.8.0 has been released and new features requiring localisation are being developed. Current message volume is 1,767 (+53) regular messages and 455 (no change) optional messages. Contributions are especially welcome to the languages that are near the 25% inclusion criteria or already below it.
Vocabulary trainer: this product makes it possible to use OmegaWiki word collections as input for vocabulary training. It currently contains 63 (-1) messages and one optional message.
Commonist, a MediaWiki bulk upload tool, contains 50 messages.
Mwlib.rl, an open source Python-based MediaWiki parser, contains 27 messages.

Statistics

We run daily statistics on all supported products. Here is an overview of localisation statuses for the various products, and a comparison with the previous report (15 December), per 2 February 2009.

MediaWiki: Supported languages: 322 (+0%)
MediaWiki: 98% of most often used messages translated: 91 (-13%)
MediaWiki: 90% translated: 70 (+7%)
MediaWiki: 90% Wikimedia extensions translated: 27 (+8%)
MediaWiki: 65% Extensions translated: 24 (+41%)

FreeCol: Supported languages 97 (+10%)
FreeCol: 90% translated: 20 (+18%)

Vocabulary trainer: Supported languages: 64 (+14%)
Vocabulary trainer: 90% translated: 28 (+47%)

MantisBT: Supported languages 58 (+12%)
MantisBT: 90% translated: 14 (+17%)

Mwlib.rl: Supported languages: 34 (+162%)
Mwlib.rl: 90% translated: 17 (+98%)

Commonist: Supported languages: 44 (no comparison data yet)
Commonist: 90% translated: 30 (no comparison data yet)

Languages with the most edits in the past month

 1. Tagalog (tl) (5,049 edits)
 2. Alemannic (gsw) (5,021 edits)
 3. Japanese (ja) (2,453 edits)
 4. Portugese (pt) (2,453 edits)
 5. Belarusian (Taraskievica orthography) (be-tarask) (2,225 edits)
 6. Spanish (es) (2,148 edits)
 7. Norwegian (Nynorsk) (nn) (1,878 edits)
 8. Galician (gl) (1,820 edits)
 9. Lower Sorbian (dsb) (1,650 edits)
10. Polish (pl) (1,495 edits)

Top contributors since the last newsletter

 1. AnakngAraw (12,962 edits) Languages: Tagalog
 2. Als-Holder (8,019 edits) Languages: Alemannic, German
 3. Harald Khan (6,486 edits) Languages: Norwegian (Nynorsk)
 4. Michawiki (5,721 edits) Languages: Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian
 5. Fryed-peach (5,494 edits) Languages: Japanese
 6. Smeira (3,831 edits) Languages: Volapük
 7. Malafaya (3,547 edits) Languages: Portugese, Ido
 8. Purodha (3,234 edits) Languages: Ripuarian
 9. Joseph (2,655 edits) Languages: Turkish
10. Jim-by (2,591 edits) Languages: Belarusian (Taraskievica orthography)

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

You are one of over 1,100 people receiving this e-mail because you have registered with Betawiki (http://translatewiki.net), the wiki for the localisation projects of MediaWiki, MantisBT, FreeCol, and others. This newsletter will be sent at most once every month.

You can opt-out by visiting Betawiki, logging in, and checking the box at the bottom of the tab 'Misc' in your preferences - although we hope you will not. If you have multiple accounts with the same e-mail address, you have to opt-out for all of them.