Language Onboarding and Development
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Language Onboarding and Development
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Language Onboarding & Development is an initiative led by a sub team in the Wikimedia Language and Product Localization aimed at facilitating targeted interventions and engagements for language life cycle challenges .
We continue to be closely involved in both the technical and community aspects of language life cycle stages while directly interacting with language communities and key stakeholders, hearing first hand on the fundamental pain points and co-creating solutions. This combined effort continues to strengthen support for language life cycle initiatives through both short term and long term efforts. Write to us on the talk page on ways you can engage or collaborate!
Language Life Cycle Challenges - Present Situation
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Wikipedia projects evolve through distinct lifecycle stages , incubating, new, small, medium, and large. Each of the Language Lifecycle stages presents unique challenges that require tailored approaches. During the incubation stage, the primary challenge is building a viable community: many projects begin with only a few contributors, making it difficult to maintain consistent activity, test localization, and demonstrate readiness for approval. Once a wiki becomes newly launched, the focus shifts to establishing basic governance, onboarding new contributors, and ensuring essential technical configurations and documentation are in place. Small wikis often struggle with sustainability issues such as low editor retention, limited administrative capacity, and reliance on a handful of highly active contributors, which can slow content growth and community development. As wikis grow into medium-sized communities, challenges become more complex, including managing governance structures, preventing contributor burnout, improving content quality, and scaling coordination among volunteers. Understanding these evolving challenges across the lifecycle of a wiki is fundamental to provide targeted support and ensuring that communities can grow sustainably over time.
Over the past 10 years, 144 new Wikipedias graduated from the Wikimedia Incubator. If a similar number comes online in the next decade, the number of emerging Wikipedias will only continue to increase. This demonstrates that emerging wikipedias are not marginal, they are a growing and meaningful part of the movement’s ecosystem. Digging deeper, we realise there are more test projects currently incubated (about 800 wikis) than hosted projects (about 300 wikis) Reference. Yet many of these wikipedias continue many launch without structured support, clear growth pathways, or simplified configuration tools. Let alone those that are incubating, currently 300+ wikis are already hosted on the platform, only 8 of them are considered as developed.
Key learnings from short term efforts
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Several research experiments have already been carried out under this initiative, yielding valuable learnings. The Language Onboarding Experiment 2024 tested whether moving incubating languages directly to production with modern editing tools would boost activity, and found that technical improvements alone are insufficient, growing the editor base and enhancing community onboarding is essential. Building on that, the Engage Native Speakers to Improve Vital Content in Small Language Wikipedias experiment explored approaches to increase editing activity by reaching native speakers where they are, guiding them through contribution paths, and providing tailored onboarding and support. These experiments enriched our understanding of the challenges in different life cycle stages of a language; incubating, new and small and provided a foundation to brainstorm longer term efforts.
Beyond tooling and experiments, the initiative has also surfaced recommendations (2023‑24) that emphasize both infrastructure and social pathways for onboarding such as simplifying new language setup, strengthening onboarding experiences, increasing outreach, improving documentation and discoverability, and building community support networks. We have also continued to add new languages to Names.php and translatewiki, providing the needed internationalization support. In 24-25, we resolved 132 tickets ,about 50% of the tickets entailed adding languages to translatewiki & mediawiki, 88.4%from Global South, 39.1% from Africa,50% of the tickets were for Keyboard support, Messages, Namespaces etc. In 23-24 we resolved 54 tickets, about 30% entailed adding languages to translatewiki and names.php, 80.1% of the languages were from Global South, 40% from Africa, 70% of resolved tickets on keyboard support, messages, namespaces etc. Cumulatively, we have onboarded 100+ languages to either translatewiki and names.php in the last two years.
Building on our Learnings
[edit]Building on our learnings so far, in October 2025 we started exploring targeted approaches that would present an opportunity to inform and implement stage-specific interventions that strengthen Wikimedia’s language projects throughout their lifecycle addressing the unique needs of each stage.
A key foundation this work is the Starter Kit, an approach designed to help new language Wikipedias understand what they need to start and make progress. The Starter Kit combines curated tools, configurations, activity indicators, health metrics, and milestone paths that guide communities through setup and progression, lowering the cognitive & technical barriers that often impede early growth. It also includes health dashboards and clear actionable steps both critical components for informing future WikiHealth analytics and lifecycle support systems.
Relevant links
[edit]- Engage native speakers to improve vital content in small language Wikipedias -a cross departmental experiment in 2025 by WMF teams
- Languages Onboarding Experiment 2024 – Executive Summary a cross departmental experiment by WMF teams
- Slides from a Celtic Knot 2024 on the current and future state of language incubation, research findings and potential improvements.
- Slides from a Wikimania 2024 session that focused on the state of language technology and onboarding at Wikimedia. Link to the video recording.
- WMF's study on Incubator and language representation in 2023 across Wikimedia projects.
- Research findings from the Language Diversity Hub in 2023 examining challenges faced by contributors to small language versions of Wikipedia.
- Session on increasing language diversity on Wikimedia projects by Sadik Shahadu at Wikindaba 2023.
- Gathering at WikiIndaba in 2023 organized by User:MMunyoki (WMF) focusing on Language onboarding & incubator meetup.