Work in progress, just collecting links for stuff to cover/steal for now.
Aim: write a (verbose and complete) history of this wiki; Project:About will stay the fully official and concise one.
2005-03-18 Nukawiki name is in use (Nike has password reset emails)
March 2005: this wiki is born (logo created on 19 March 2005, local install on the 9th or before)
Nukawiki at jadesukka.homelinux.org:8180/(golem|betawiki|mediawiki15c|wiki) [5][6]
Jadesukka is the name of Nikerabbit's laptop of the time: the wiki run on it and had problems when Nikerabbit moved to a "very small dormitory" (cf. Erik's interview) due to university.
2005: first users, probably recruited on IRC when not friends. For instance, dungodung (#35, first in log, 19 August) registered to test something, after meeting Nikerabbit and receiving help from him for MediaWiki/sr.wiki localisation problems on #mediawiki and #wikimedia-tech.
2005-04-24: Betawiki name is in use (Nike has password reset emails)
2005-05-24: Betawiki is in use, private emails about syncing LanguageSk to the wiki
June 2005 first commits (r9790 first l10n-related)
June-July 2005 started general l10n stats with Ævar and Hashar [7]
August 2005 first commits to update l10n by submitting patches from various sources (includingMeta: MessagesXx.php pages , from very old bugs to more recent bug backlog to a constant stream of patch submissions including the first commit of 2007 at midnight/4 EEST (peak till June 2006, then military service), till August 2007 mainly.[8]
Gangleri immediately used Nukawiki and Golem to test MediaWiki 1.5, templates, interwikis, "portability" and Yiddish interface, linking it from bugzilla reports and (ro|de|fr|en).wiki and asking interested users to join him, e.g. Patrick (user 23), Get It (25), Ggonnell (28), Parerga. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]
Gangleri's #wikipedia-BiDi (m:BiDi workgroup) used as IRC support channel for a while (later on #mediawiki and finally #mediawiki-i18n, saying to ask nikerabbit or robchurch).
9 May 2006 "I work since few weeks wit[h] Nikerabbit to get most of the special pages fixed".[38]
Talks give hints about users he invited and who responded.[39][40]
Chronological global edits [41][42] (68+75 wikis with some edits not shown [43][44]
Betawiki had 43 users in April; in May, June and July-August it had 97, 72 and 49 new users respectively, with peaks perfectly coinciding with the delivery of the weekly news.[62] May-June peak of sysop flagging to allow translation etc.[63][64].
May 2006: LanguageXx pages are deleted on Meta, because they had been used to localise MediaWiki but got "obsoleted"/inactive in 2004 after translation via MediaWiki: namespace was enabled.
How/Who/Where: patches for bugzilla from Betawiki translations in 2005-2006 and later?
In 2006, there was a local hack to export Betawiki's translation, perhaps with these parameters[69]: something better than the standard format=php export on Special:AllMessage, which just listed them alphabetically.
Betawiki staff also often imported messages from wikipedias where they were translated locally, which needed lots of cleanup.
Some language portals had not only a contact person but even a responsible for the creation of patches to submit on bugzilla and then be applied. This was probably [an attempt] to reduce the work for Nikerabbit and Gangleri, but it's unclear if this worked/what was the actual process in most cases.
In 2007 the current translatewiki.net staff was complete (photo 2011)
2 February 2007: Raymond takes over the submission of patches, which have then a big slowdown in December.[78]
28 March 2007: Wikimedia's language proposal policy (created in November 2006) is amended to include «There are localization files available in that language» as a requirement for creating new Wikimedia projects. Before this rule, and especially before the language policy existed, many wikis were created without a localised interface; as of 2013, 10 such wikis still don't have any localisation.
April 2007: MediaWiki i18n "call to arms" by Rob Church to get more translators (also: "shall we just make him [Nikerabbit] the official i18n co-ordinator?"), after some discussions about new projects rejection and "The language (prevention) committee directing people to Betawiki and acknowledging work by Nikerabbit and Gangleri. See example message (August 2007) from LangCom conditionally approving a new wiki, translating on Betawiki being a requirement.
May 2007–February 2008: for about 81 weeks, the English Wikipedia Signpost features a permanent section on Betawiki/translatewiki.net.
August 2007 and then October (and more?): Siebrand posts a message "Betawiki: better support for your language in MediaWiki" on Meta and several (20?) Wikipedias' village pumps and embassies (especially 26–27.8, 20–28.9, 7.10, 13–15.12 in 2007), e.g. [79][80], and sends reminders to old translators (especially 5 November 2007, 14–16 August 2008), e.g. [81][82][83][84]. In 2008, 2009 and 2010 GerardM sends the same message and localisation statistics updates for the relevant language (e.g. [85]) on hundreds of wikis, for a total of about 3500 edits.
4 September 2007: Siebrand starts taking care of exports (commits) to MediaWiki from Betawiki directly ("Diffs checked by Raymond"). This will be the standard way from now on, with daily updated to MediaWiki. Occasional direct updates by Raymond and Grondin.
September 2007: creating and sending patches is still considered the standard way to send translations (together with unified patches hunting on bugzilla and mailing lists), but Betawiki starts its way towards being the official localisation platform. At the end of the year Category:Unified patches is deleted.
December 2007: An update on localisation in MediaWiki by Siebrand, setting 7 localisation statistics goals and very discussed e.g. about quality of translations on Betawiki and gatekeeping.[95][96] Following updates will take the acknowledgement of translatewiki.net for granted. 2007 is the first year of operation on large scale and has doubled the number of languages with MediaWiki core fully translated, from 25 to 50 (compared to the beginning of the statistics series); 2008 has also been very active and the number has been stable around 70 ever since.
2008 and around: Gangleri created commons:User:i18n and advertised it around as a set of useful links; actually more information about (crosswiki) gadgets.
February 2008: first recorded appearance of "Powered by netcup" in the footer for the sponsored server. Siebrand says he initially has paid a server for few months on his own.
April 2008: after a lot of efforts by Nikerabbit for conversion to standard i18n system and tests with Semantic Forms, Semantic MediaWiki is supported on Betawiki and doubles language support in 24 h.[97][98]
May 2008: Betawiki status report. Monthly newsletter and message improvements requests begin.
Summercode Finland 2008 (kesäkoodi): «translation support for projects other than MediaWiki», by adding Gettext support, page translation (for docs) and several other features like statistics. Translate version/release was called number 9 (2008-08-04:1).
18 July 2011: Nikerabbit begins job with Wikimedia Foundation; less love available for (and less things happening on) translatewiki.net from now on.
Spring 2012: Wikimedia Git conversion. Export and then LocalisationUpdate[100] problems (bug 36349, announce), MediaWiki updates (and more) not reliable for some months, resulting in cries for help.[101]
21 November 2012:[102] «twn is great – at the beginning I wouldn't even have thought that my pull request with i18n support would be accepted; then we found someone who'd translate it to french (we already had german at that time...); then someone whipped up a spanish translation; and only today we joined twn to be welcomed with support for, what?, 4 new languages? Amazing!» (Marcel Klehr).
July 2013: Wikia promises stable financial support for translation rallies.
2013-09-12: Last known day on which the site has a description in the HTML title, namely "free & open-source software translation wiki" (as it had been since 2008).
2013-10-29: Migration to the new server, also on netcup.de, doubling capacity to 4 cores and 16 GB RAM.
2015-05-23: The old server is being repurposed to host the ElasticSearch backend (for search translation and translation memory).
2018-02-13: Succession plan is created by Nike – inspired by a FOSDEM presentation.
2018-03-19: Migration from HHVM back to PHP.
....
Questions and todos
How did Gangleri find Nukawiki? [Niklas doesn't know.]
Where was the creation of mediawiki-i18n (both list and channel) discussed/decided in 2006? [Niklas doesn't remember]
Gangleri's October 2006–October 2007 absence[103] mentioned by SabineCretella due to personal circumstances.
Translate's SVN history for high level development overview.
Translation memory saga. Which leads to the question, what's part of TWN history? What about all the other MediaWiki/Wikimedia i18n efforts by Niklas and others (now mainly l10n team)? Probably only if they actually started from TWN and arguably made possible by TWN itself and its community knowledge: Plural, Grammar, Gender etc.? Let's be inclusive (more work!).
inode problem (not the same as message cache)
inode problem was relatively minor. It was an initial misconfiguration in the netcup.de VPS setup. Siebrand 09:12, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
Who were the first registered users? (May ask them what they remember.) Got a list of first 49 users including 34 before the first logged one.
Special:Contributions/Tester1 includes edits by different users (even anonymous), has been registered after its first edit. Database hacking?
