Language Onboarding and Development/Status Updates/Q2 2025-26

Q2 2025-26 Oct to Dec

• Strategized and designed an experiment aimed at aimed at surfacing content gaps contribution opportunities to native speakers and  engage them in expanding articles using contribution tools
• Resolved 14 tickets in total on Localisation and Internationalisation support ; 5 Languages onboarded, 6 tickets on technical volunteer engagement on namespaces, adding new languages and. numerals. Additionally, engaged at 3 collaboration spaces, Language community meeting , published a newsletter and Wikiconference North America

Hypothesis work; Surface Content gaps contribution opportunities  to engage native speakers in small wikis (Strategize/Design)

• Objective; Make more vital knowledge available and well illustrated across languages and topics( link ) Key Result: By the end of Q2, implement 3 interventions that help contributors to improve the state of vital content on their Wikipedia

  Hypothesis WE2.1.5: If we surface content gaps contribution opportunities to native speakers and  engage them in expanding articles using contribution tools, (e.g., content/section translation), a higher proportion of these contributors on smaller wikis will contribute to vital articles (Strategize/Design]

  Key accomplishments
  • An onboarding material providing step-by-step, tailored guidance over three weeks on improving vital articles using contribution tools (Visual Editor, Content/Section Translation) was developed and received feedback from the Community Development team
  • A script to generate direct/one-click URLs for expanding article sections using the Section Translation tool and opening articles directly in Visual Editor mode was also created: T409222.
  • Two communities, Telugu and Moroccan Arabic, were chosen for the study, and the following asks were shared with them to help coordinate the experiment:Event registration setup, Translating content for onboarding material and banner, Identifying vital articles,Emailing participants from the previous experiment
  • Thanks to User: Chaduvari , a Telugu community member that provided translations for the event landing page (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Chaduvari/Vital_Knowledge_Drive_2025-te), the five pillars, and banner.
  • A Central Notice banner design was developed, and permissions were obtained to deploy it to the selected communities: T409227 and T409128.
  • Necessary setup to track edits made from event pages is in progress here: T410362. It relies on the landing pages that have not yet been created, and their names are required for tracking. This work will continue in the following quarter.

We will continue this work next quarter (January 2026- March 2026) under a new hypothesis, focusing on delivery and piloting. We plan to include one additional wiki and conduct CN outreach through larger wikis as well.

Essential work: Communities particularly new & smaller ones are supported with internationalization and localisation workflows and features to help them move towards their goals.

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Key Result; Respond to internationalisation and localisation requests through timely interventions and engagements to support Language communities to move towards their goals.

This area includes technical efforts to enable newly introduced or  smaller languages  to be accessible, usable and sustainable on Wikimedia environments. This has entailed resolving internationalization, and localization needs of these language communities including onboarding new languages,  UI localisation, Plural support, Keyboard support, Fall back among other areas categorised into various focus areas depending on prioritization per quarter.

• Respond to language onboarding requests through timely interventions and engagements to support Language communities to move towards their goals. Additionally, develop a prototype script that automates the process of adding a language to Mediawiki Core including the necessary language config variables

  5 completed tickets
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T406198 Add Bono (abr) to Names.php
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T405473Add Hyam (jab) to translatewiki.net
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T409708 Add Bole (bol) to Names.php
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T409846Add Shughni (sgh) to translatewiki.net
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T408150Add Jju (kaj) to Names.php

Resolve at least 5 internationalisation and localisation requests per quarter through timely interventions and engagements to support Language communities requesting technical assistance T407935

6 completed tickets

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T381137Add Yami (tao) to Wikidata (lexemes + monolingual text)
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T380975Add Kanakanavu (xnb) to Wikidata (lexemes + monolingual text)
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T328207 Change Namespace Aliases on diq.wikipedia
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T381060Add Saaroa (sxr) to Wikidata (lexemes + monolingual text)
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T380964Add Tsou (tsu) to Wikidata (lexemes + monolingual text)
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392749Add Hokkien Hàn-lô writing systems to translatewiki.net
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T382781Change Levantine Arabic's interface to Western Arabic numerals

Additionally, engaged at 3 collaboration and engagement spaces; Wikimania, Language community meting and published a newsletter

• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T408944 Organize language community meeting (November 2025)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T401766 Publish Quarterly "Language & Internationalization Newsletter" for October 2025
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T407951WikiConfNA 2025 Session: Fast-Tracking Languages from the Incubator What We Tried, What We Learned