Milkshake/status

Last update on: 2012-11-monthly

2012-07
Development started.

2012-08-monthly
Development on Project Milkshake continued at a lower priority due to the focus on the Universal Language Selector this month. We are getting some basic blocks together in our GitHub repositories.

2012-09-monthly
The Universal Language Selector is now mostly complete, and talks are underway with Wikimedia operations to plan the first deployments of it on (very) small Wikimedia wikis. The reason for a very careful deployment is that there are very valid concerns for so-called "cache fragmentation", having to store multiple versions of a content page, each with a different user language, to be served to anonymous users with different browser language settings, compared to the current caching strategy of serving all anonymous users with the same single cached version.

The Language Engineering team has made presentations about the project Milkshake components at San Francisco State University, Twitter, Google and Change.org.

2012-11-monthly
The first phase of the Universal Language Selector (ULS) was completed in November. The jQuery modules jQuery.ULS, jQuery.IME, jQuery Webfonts and jQuery i18n have had their first stable version. The Universal Language Selector MediaWiki extension is now being used on Wikidata. During the DevCamp in Bangalore, experimentations were done with ULS in Android, a Chrome extension was created to make jQuery.IME usable in the Chrome web browser, and an extension for Firefox implementing the input methods is underway.

The first contributions by non-Wikimedia developers have been made, which indicates that the jQuery extensions are getting some attention. The Wikimedia Language Engineering team will now put the modules and MediaWiki extension in maintenance mode until April 2013.