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Language Onboarding and Development/Status Updates/Q3 2025-26

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Q3 2025-26 Jan to March

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  • Drafted Starter kit concept, designed initial mock ups including 3 key elements i.e Essential tasks, Community & Collaboration, Activity and Growth and kicked of development of the 1st essential feature i.e the Wikipedia Mainpage Customization feature.
  • Designed an approach to surface content contribution opportunities via Wikipedia Mainpage, engaged 6 communities on potential collaboration and implementation kicked off in 2 communities.
  • Resolved 11tickets in total on Localisation and Internationalisation support ; 7 Languages onboarded, 4 tickets on technical volunteer engagement on namespaces, fallback, messages and date format.

Starter Kit Concept, Designs & Development of 1st Essential task feature

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By the end of Q4, design , develop and test concept of a Wikipedia Starter kit, a language lifecycle sensitive approach for new Wikipedias that will provide essential tasks, tools and resources for making progress towards becoming a small Wikipedia, with an evaluation from Wikipedia administrators testing and providing feedback

Shows the Starter Kit dashboard highlighting Essential Tasks, Community & Collaboration, and Activity & Growth sections.

Key Accomplishments

  • In Q2 last year, we began exploring the concept of a Wikipedia starter kit, a language lifecycle sensitive approach that will provide  Wikipedia administrators with essential tasks, tools and resources for growing a language community. This quarter we made signifiant progress in various fronts in terms of designing the mock ups and developing the 1st feature i.e mainpage customization
  • Shared Homepage customization feature  at the Language Community meeting more about this work. Summary of the feedback received.
  • Significant milestone in brainstorming potential designs at team offsite and refining those to create mockups for the starter kit dashboard and a main page customization feature.
  • Drafted an internal technical plan covering goals, workflow, and implementation for the pilot phase. The current approach includes a Vue 3 frontend, a Node.js + Express API backend, a lightweight SQLite database, OAuth 1.0a for authentication, and deployment on Toolforge. Link to repository https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/lpl/starterkit-v1
  • Concluded early impact assessment for the starter kit- There are 116 small Wikipedias in the Wikipedia ecosystem, supported by 197 monthly active administrators in total. Collectively, these graduated wikis have contributed 413,912 articles
  • Conducted a  recent analysis that showed that 217 Wikipedias are using the top gadgets, while 149 are missing them highlighting a clear infrastructure gap across wikis.
  • Team presented the Starter Kit designs at the monthly Language Diversity Hub meeting to gather feedback on how it can best support new and smaller language communities. Overall, the response was very positive, and it was encouraging to see interest in how this could support language onboarding. Some of the feedback included making the selection of focus areas for main page customization even more intuitive, thinking through multilingual considerations, being mindful of policy translation challenges, and exploring ways communities can track growth through relevant metrics.

Surface contribution opportunities to native speakers via Wikipedia Mainpage (Execution)

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Surface contribution opportunities via Wikipedia Mainpage-April 2026- Nepali Wikipedia ( in Nepali).pdf

By the end of Q4, surface content gaps contribution opportunities on Wikipedia MainPage to native speakers and engage them in expanding articles using contribution tools (e.g content/section translation),

Key Accomplishments

  • Suggestions from the team offsite highlighted customization of the main homepage into various options, such as growing content and improving quality, as an approach that can be tested in the Starter Kit T410699 to boost language community growth.
  • We began experimenting approaches to surface contribution opportunities via Wikipedia Main page to engage native speakers, improve content, and direct them to relevant tools article expansion tools.
  • Identified six Wikipedias; Lithuanian, Cebuano, Nepali, Bikol Central, Togan, Telugu., whom we reached out to for potential collaboration.
  • About 3 communities have now expressed interest in participating in the experiment i.e Nepali, Tongan and Telugu. Kudos to a Nepali contributor, Saroj, who has actively been helping in translation of the onboarding resources. A list of Section Translation URLs was generated programmatically for a set of vital articles for Nepali Wikipedia so that they can be embedded on the main page and linked with the onboarding resource ahead of testing with communities. Two of the communities are already implementing the experiment. Nepali has set up their main page (main page in english translation ) and event registration. Similarly, Tongan has set up their main page and event registration. So far Nepali has 16 registered users participating in the experiment.

Language Onboarding (i18n & L10n Support)

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Resolve at least 10 internationalisation and localisation requests per quarter through timely interventions and engagements to support Language communities

This area includes technical efforts to enable newly introduced or  smaller languages  to be usable . 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.

    7 completed tickets
  • ✅ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T409393 Add Javanese variant jv-java to Names.php
  • ✅ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T411884 Add Nawat (ppl) to Names.php
  • ✅ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T402159 Add Sasak (sas) to Names.php
  • ✅ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T415094 Add Jambi Malay (jax) to translatewiki.net
  • ✅ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T416618 Add Saho (ssy) to translatewiki.net
  • ✅ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T418150 Add Wapan (juk) to translatewiki.net
  • ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T417024 Add Western Pwo (pwo) to translatewiki.net

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

4 completed tickets

Additionally, engaged at Language community meting and through published a newsletter

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