The Universal Language Selector (ULS), a MediaWiki extension to configure language settings, has now been deployed on more than 150 Wikimedia wikis. Deployment started with the first phase on June 11, and over 5 phases it will be made available on all Wikimedia wikis. ULS replaces the extensions Narayam and WebFonts which were used to configure input and font settings respectively.
During the last two development sprints, the Wikimedia Language Engineering team worked with the wiki communities to resolve critical bugs and enhancement requests, and to test features, and we communicated widely while completing 2 more phases of deployment. In the 2nd and 3rd phases, deployment was completed for Wikipedia wikis ranked in size between 11-20 and for wikis with no language versions.
User setting features were tested in major web-browsers and operating systems. This includes recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. The tests were manually done using a test plan based on user scenarios for different functionality.
The announcement on Meta-Wiki is also available in more than 40 languages. This announcement page will be used for all deployment phases. Prior to deployment, all the updated wikis were informed about the this change simultaneously on their respective community portals.
Besides the wikis, the current version of the ULS can be viewed and tested on the beta installation of the English language Wikipedia. Bug fixing and integration testing will continue. The test steps can be used to verify the functionality.
Next phase of deployment
On July 2, 2013, ULS will be deployed on the English Wikipedia. More information about the Universal Language Selector can be found on the feature page, and the FAQ. Feedback can be sent using Bugzilla, via the mailing list, and on IRC (#mediawiki-i18n on freenode). The deployment of this extension was also discussed and queries were addressed during our last office hour (complete log of discussion). The Language Engineering team will be following up with more announcements, translation requests and Village Pump/Community Portal interactions to optimize the Universal Language Selector on the wikis.
Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering
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