Wikimedia Language engineering/Reports/2018/March

Monthly updates from the Wikimedia Language team about changes to internationalization and translation and other language support features. Names of people assumed to contribute as volunteers are in bold text.

Content Translation
Content Translation allows people to translate Wikipedia articles. Also check out out the newsletter and updates about version 2.


 * Infrastructure changes to improve links metadata (to facilitate adapting links across languages), and image support.
 * Support for basic publishing of translations (further work on communicating issues to be done).
 * Support for category adaptation. Categories get added to the translation automatically based on the existing ones, and users can remove them or add new ones.
 * Layout adjustments to customize the editing toolbar, the sticky headers and how both fit together.
 * Frequently requested features from VE are now available in CX2 with the new editing surface such as copy&paste links, edit link labels, reliable undo/redo, insert new templates, and converting wiki-syntax.
 * Clean-up of the source article to remove irrelevant sections for the translation such as hat notes, metadata or links to sister projects.
 * The version used remains persistent as part of each translation to support backwards compatibility, and as users navigate between the dashboard and the editor to facilitate testing.

Usage data
Notes:
 * Crossed 300,000 published pages 🎉
 * Unusually large number of deletions in Arabic and Bengali because of vandalism.

Translate
Wikimedia's software is translated to hundreds of languages using the Translate extension for MediaWiki. In addition it is used to translate help pages, newsletters, policies, announcements, banners, etc. It is installed on Wikimedia special projects, translatewiki.net and many other sites. Translate is part of MLEB.

Usage data
''Numbers are as of 2018-04-10. Deltas are not shown because they are not comparable with previous and next month.''
 * Translatable pages: Meta 4377; MediaWiki.org 3646; Commons 746 [1][2][3]
 * Translate extension is installed on 207 wikis Wikiapiary

Universal Language Selector
Universal Language Selector provides language selector, list of suggested languages, input methods and web fonts. It is part of MLEB.

Significant changes:
 * Added the option for detailed logging of failed searches for language names, including page title and ULS instance. This will allow analyzing which articles are readers most interested in reading in different languages, and how are different instances of ULS are used, and to improve the functionality of the search box. (T179402)
 * Fixed Ctrl-Clicking in Compact Language Links, based on user feedback after deploying to the English Wikipedia (T189582)

Other extensions
Babel (part of MLEB):
 * User Jayprakash12345 removed deprecated code. T189222
 * Tim Starling made Babel better at avoiding database writes during GET requests. T154556

cldr (Common Locale Data Repository) (part of MLEB):

CleanChanges (part of MLEB):

LocalisationUpdate (part of MLEB):

TranslationNotifications:

MediaWiki core internationalization
Changes to translations and equivalent localisation data (magic words, namespace names) are not included in this list. The volunteer translators are updating translations every day to keep up with changes.

Project Milkshake
Project Milkshake consists of four re-usable jquery internationalization libraries.

jquery.i18n
 * No noteworthy changes.

jquery.uls
 * Amir Aharoni added an option that allows identifying the context used for ULS within the app.
 * Niklas Laxström improved  script.
 * Amir Aharoni made the event object available for click handlers, so that apps can handle shift-click correctly, for example.
 * Kunal Mehta updated credits.
 * Amir Aharony added maximum length limit to language search.

jquery.webfonts
 * No changes.

jquery.ime
 * No changes.

translatewiki.net
See also translatewiki.net news page.

Stats

 * About 80 (=) new users
 * About 360 (+30) translators made about 57k (+3k) edits
 * About 90 (-15) translators reviewed about 29k (+7k) translations

Sources:

TwnMainPage

 * No noteworthy changes.

Deployments and other site related updates

 * Added non-default Apertium Machine Translation support for Russian to Ukrainian.



Team news

 * Office hour hosted on March 24th, about Compact Language Links. See: log & video recording