Wikimedia Language engineering/Reports/2014-15 Q3 Report

Period: January-March 2015

Deployment and Availability

 * Content Translation first deployed on 8 Wikipedias. Gradually more languages were added, growing up 20 by the end of the quarter. At the time of writing this report Content Translation is available in 23 Wikipedias. Complete List.
 * Machine Translation support via Apertium is provided for 12 languages. The highest number of articles translated in a language without machine translation support is French.
 * Initially source languages were separately mapped for each target language. Later, all available source languages were enabled for use by any target language, thus expanding the scope for wider use.
 * New languages are deployed as per requests received from the user community, or opportunities as perceived by the Language Engineering team. Request queue.
 * Deployments are handled by Language Engineering and Technical Ops. Prior to deployment, checks are done to ascertain any special requirements for the particular language and tests are done on beta-labs to check for any failures.
 * Post-deployment issues may surface, especially on Wikipedias with special tools or templates. For instance, publishing on the Spanish Wikipedia failed repeatedly until it was discovered to be caused by an abusefilter.

Bug fixes and other development

 * Bug fixes for issues reported during this period was the major area of developer focus. These included publishing errors, section alignment, links etc. that users faced while translating.
 * Analytics related to Content Translation data needed special attention during the last few weeks of the quarter. This was particularly important to ascertain the adoption and usage trends that provided the success metrics for the tool overall and also for individual features.
 * The highlight of the new feature initiatives is the addition of new entry points at several stages of the reading/editing workflow. This is part of a major UX design overhaul. During this quarter 3 entry points were made available: contributions page, popover menu from the contributions menu and invitation to try the tool during new article creation (for user's who haven't enabled the beta-feature). An increase in beta feature activations and published translations were produced after the new entry points were made available.
 * An API was developed that can be used to expose the modifications made by users on top of the machine translations. This is expected to help the MT service providers to improve the translation engines,

Usage Data
The following data is for the period 16 January (coinciding with the availability of Content Translation on Wikipedias for the time) to 31 March 2015:

Other Projects
Projects other than Content Translation that are in different stages of ongoing maintenance are:
 * MediaWiki i18n (general improvements, bug fixes etc.)
 * Extensions
 * Babel
 * CLDR
 * LocalisationUpdate
 * Translate
 * TwnMainPage
 * Universal Language Selector
 * ULS Compact Language Links
 * MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB)
 * Milkshake Libraries

Objective for 2014-15 Q3
For FY 2014-15 Q3 i.e January to March 2015, the objective was to collect and analyse data that would indicate the extensions and tools that needed to be prioritized in the development cycles. Data such as bug reports or open patchsets since January 1 2014 (i.e. from the time CX was started), were considered as key indicators of activity and attention. The next step was to prepare a plan for Q4 for consistent development attention to the focus areas.