Language and Internationalization/Newsletters/5

Welcome to the January 2025 edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter by the Wikimedia Foundation and support work, community meetings, and ideas to get involved in contributing to the projects.

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Key highlights

Contribute menu enabled in 144 wikis

The Contribute menu, found under user contributions on Wikimedia wikis, offers editors various ways to engage, such as starting a translation, exploring suggested edits, uploading files, or creating new articles. This menu is being gradually introduced to wikis where translation tools and features are available, meaning editors can easily translate existing content or contribute in multiple languages. So far, the menu has been enabled on 144 wikis, with 221 more planned for future rollout.^[1]

Five New Languages Added to Wikipedia

Southern Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Iban, Obolo, and Tai Nüa have received a Wikipedia as part of the Future of Language Incubation initiative ^[2][3]. This initiative is a new experiment designed to test ideas for supporting the growth of new language editions of Wikipedia. It is part of a larger effort under the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan 2024–25 to help communities close knowledge gaps by making tools and systems more accessible, adaptable, and effective. The goal is to increase the creation and availability of reliable encyclopedic content. These five languages represent millions of speakers around the world.

Book a Community Consultation with the Language Diversity Hub

The here, and the team will follow up.^[4]

Language Support for New and Existing Languages

9 Languages were added to translatewiki.net, including Acholi ^[5], Fur ^[6], Mansi ^[7].

Translatewiki.net is a platform that enables communities to localize the software into their languages before the language becomes fully supported.   These translations are essential for making the platform user-friendly in their language and are a key step in the new wiki creation process. With these new languages added, users can now translate the user interface messages they see on Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia (e.g., menus, buttons, and system notifications).

4 Languages were added to , including Chakma ^[8] and Tigre ^[9]. Among these languages is also Duala, which has become the first language from Cameroon to be supported by MediaWiki, marking an important milestone for linguistic diversity on Wikimedia platforms.^[10] This is the next step after Translatewiki.net and involves making these languages officially supported by the MediaWiki software. With this support, speakers of these languages can use Wikimedia websites like Wikipedia or Wiktionary in their own language and create or contribute content directly.

Furthermore, several Configuration fixes were implemented, such as fixing line height ^[11] renaming autonyms ^[12], adding or modifying namespace translations ^[13] and adding new keyboards ^[14]. Learn more here.

Community defined lists

In November 2024, the Language and Product Localization team launched an exciting new feature in the Content Translation tool: Community-defined lists. This innovative translation suggestion feature is designed to enhance the experience for translators working in Wikis where the All collection category of suggested articles.

Wikiproject Campaign organizers can take advantage of this feature by incorporating the  ‎<page-collection>...‎</page-collection> tag into their campaign article list on Meta-wiki. This simple addition will make those articles readily discoverable in the Content Translation tool, connecting more translators with topics they are passionate about.

For a comprehensive guide on how to effectively use this tool and the tagging process, please refer to the provided. Getting involved in Wikiprojects campaigns has never been easier!

Community meetings and events

• Wikimedians at Global Voices Summit 2024 in Nepal. A session on Ravitej_Neeli, had their first MediaWiki core patch merged–kudos!
• In case you missed the language community meeting in August, you can catch up by watching the to attend the upcoming meeting in February.
• Language and Product Localization team members shared their experience from organizing a hackathon at the Wikimedia Technology Summit 2024.
• The 2024 Global Voices Summit in Nepal brought together voices from around the world to discuss preserving endangered languages and strengthening Wikimedia’s role in this effort. Discover the key discussions and outcomes from the event here.

Get involved

• If you are looking for technical tasks, take a look at the easy tasks that haven’t been assigned yet in various language project repositories on Wikimedia Phabricator.
• Interested in contributing to language support related technical tasks for new and existing languages? See open tasks on LPL Technical Support workboard.
• If you are looking for tools to edit and translate articles and interface messages, you can use Translatewiki.net. These tools make it easier to work with content in different languages.
• Report feedback on talk pages of language tools.

Stay tuned for the next release! You can subscribe to this newsletter.

References

1.  phab:T381371
2. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/10/31/wikipedia-goes-live-for-five-languages-through-the-future-of-language-incubation-initiative/
3. Future of Language Incubation
4. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/11/26/creating-words-for-the-future-the-first-language-diversity-hub-consultation-call/
5. phab:T376060
6. phab:T378711
7. phab:T375944
8. phab:T365365
9. phab:T375052
10. https://aharoni.wordpress.com/2024/10/18/duala-becomes-the-first-language-from-cameroon-to-be-supported-by-mediawiki-the-software-that-runs-wikipedia/
11. phab:T377294
12. phab:T377294
13. phab:T377510
14. https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.ime/commit/b170943cd13c4001a5e11e0865ff351622f52f94