Wikimania, the largest gathering of the Wikimedia world, is just around the corner. In less than a week, hundreds of volunteers will be gathering in Hong Kong to share stories and talk about grand plans for the year ahead. The Language Engineering team of the Wikimedia Foundation also plans to join in! The team has been working consistently on improving internationalization support in MediaWiki tools and in Wikimedia projects. At Wikimania 2013, the team will be present to talk and exchange ideas about these projects.
Team members will be presenting technology sessions, organizing a translation sprint and showcasing at the DevCamp. At the Translation sprint workshop, participants will get a quick introduction to using the Translate extension on Wikimedia wikis and translatewiki.net. The Translate extension provides MediaWiki with essential features needed to do translation work. It can be used to translate simple content, wiki user interfaces and system messages.
In an interesting design session, our team’s interaction designer Pau Giner will be presenting on the challenges and complexities of designing language-conscious user interfaces. In the talk titled Improving the user experience of language tools, he will look at two significant projects developed by the team: the Universal Language Selector (ULS) and Translate UX as case studies.
Team engineers Amir Aharoni and Niklas Laxström will discuss multilingual feature enhancement possibilities for handling multimedia content meta-information on Wikimedia Commons. Multilingual Wikimedia Commons – What can we do about it? To find an answer, they will touch upon the advanced features in Translate, ULS and other tools that can be used to translate images, templates, descriptions and other graphics metadata to make Commons a truly multilingual Wiki.
A technical session, MediaWiki i18n getting data-driven and world-reusable, on improvements in MediaWiki internationalization (i18n) will be presented by Santhosh Thottingal and Niklas Laxström. They will be talking about the preference of using data-driven approach in place of custom code which helps code maintainability across multiple i18n frameworks. An example is data usage from the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). They will be speaking about the challenges and benefits of maintaining two code bases MediaWiki JavaScript i18n extension and the jquery.i18n library for different developer audiences.
Language team members will be part of panel discussions covering WMF Agile practices and at the Ask the Developers session. Come meet us at any of these sessions and bring your toughest language software questions along!
Complete list of Language Engineering sessions.
Runa Bhattacharjee
Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation
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