In the sprawling digital landscape of the 21st century, the Wikimedia Foundation has an increasing demand to support and provide our movement and the world at large with the infrastructure to curate human-led content and a tech-enabled knowledge system that caters for all, regardless of the language you speak.
As the Wikimedia Foundation starts the 2024–2025 fiscal year, the Product and Tech department continues to focus on knowledge equity and knowledge as a service. This extends to providing support towards creation of trustworthy encyclopedic content that encompasses all human knowledge. By working with volunteers we would like to help them identify knowledge gaps, and equip them with the tools they would need to reduce these gaps and overcome barriers that prevent continuous contributions to create encyclopedic knowledge across all languages. To facilitate the above, the Product and Tech department has a new team called the Language and Product Localization team. This team will focus more on supporting multilingualism within the movement and providing standard-based tooling for our communities to gain grounds on localised technical initiatives that will bridge knowledge gaps and promote language equity to get closer to our strategic plan of knowledge equity.
The Language and Product localisation team is born from the fusion of the Language and Inuka team to consolidate their work of providing a range of support to all languages communities, including the underserved and underrepresented communities appropriately according to their needs . They will continue to innovate, experiment and ensure our digital products and platforms are easily adapted for different languages, cultures, and regions. Forming this team is a strategic way to remove the linguistic, cultural, and other barriers in our digital world that have frustrated, curious minds eager to learn but faced with a wall of unfamiliar languages and technology. Every day, thousands face this digital Tower of Babel, their thirst for knowledge hindered by the very tools meant to quench it. The Language and Product localisation team’s work lies in this gap – this chasm between information and understanding.
Language and Product Localisation team’s work
The team will continually work on evolving our tools and experimentations and providing technical support to meet our contributors and people who use our platform where they are and transition them to their expected state in the free knowledge ecosystem. With the new team’s robust expertise, in a nutshell, they will:
- Work to create and maintain tools that facilitate the use of languages on our websites using MediaWiki like the Translate extension that translators use to translate software strings and pages in their browser.
- Provide extensive tools and features for localisation and translation used in Wikipedia and other projects. An example of this type of tool is the Universal Language Selector extension (ULS), a tool that helps people use our sites in different languages. With ULS, you can select and configure the Wikimedia platforms interface in many languages, even if your computer isn’t set up for those languages.
- Engage closely with communities to create features and technical support to advance their work in sharing and building knowledge. An example of providing technical support is helping communities resolve script issues in our projects by bringing them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium, now that the Wikimedia Foundation is a member of the Consortium.
They will focus on four key workstreams. The first is the former Language and Inuka team annual plan objectives, key results and hypothesis; some of the hypotheses that will be worked on are:
- “If we build a proof-of-concept providing translation suggestions that are based on user-selected topic areas, we will be set up to successfully test whether translators will find more opportunities to translate in their areas of interest and contribute more compared to the generic suggestions currently available.”
- By the end of Q2, support organizers, contributors, and institutions to increase the coverage of quality content in key topic areas through experiments.
You can find more information about these hypotheses and key results in this table.
The second workstream is ongoing support for essential tools and infrastructure, including continuous work on Content Translation, Machine in Translation (MinT) Wikipedia Preview, Localization infrastructure, etc. Followed by language technical support with community engagement which includes responding to i18n issues, community meetups, developer support, language onboarding, etc. And lastly, futuristic explorations and experiments that can develop into bigger features over time like the MinT project.
Why the synergy of two former teams?
The Product and Tech department consolidated the Language and Product localisation team based on the focus and need in the 2024–25 annual plan to address content and knowledge gaps. They identified an opportunity that will increase work efficiency and harness the combined skills and expertise of the former Language and Inuka teams that already have overlaps with the communities they work with; these two teams also have a shared goal of closing knowledge gaps. The department is confident that bringing them together to work more closely and focusing on tools and support systems will significantly impact this vital objective of knowledge equity.
At its core, this new team captures the Wikimedia Foundation’s work to “ensuring standards-based tooling to support multilingualism within the Wikimedia movement and advancing localised technical initiatives to reduce knowledge gaps and promote language equity.” The team is committed to breaking down language barriers and fostering a global community of knowledge creators and consumers.
As this dynamic new team sets sail on their ambitious voyage into the 2024–25 fiscal year, we invite the movement to follow their expedition and quench your curiosity with questions to the team on their plans and work. The horizon is bright with expectations as we watch them grow, innovate, and break down barriers—transforming the landscape of free knowledge and truly opening the gates of learning to every corner of our diverse global community. Stay tuned for the journey ahead!
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