Language Onboarding and Development/Status Updates/Q4 2024-25

Q4 2024-25 April to June

Summary

• Resolved 23 tickets in total on Localisation and Internationalisation support ; 14 Languages onboarded,  3 tickets on language codes, 2 tickets on Messages, 2 tickets on keyboard support, I ticket on plural support and 1 ticket on namespaces and 2 tickets on engagement and outreach.
• 12 Languages were onboarded to Wikimedia projects. 8 languages were added to translatewiki, 6 were added to Names,php. Added Languages were from different continents; 7 Languages of Asia, 3 Languages of Africa, 1 Languages of North America, 1 Languages of South America

Planning for 2025-26; Engage native speakers  to improve vital content in small language wikis

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

In 2024/25 , through the knowledge equity objective, we have have an opportunity to support incubating languages through providing modern wiki features that are currently not available in the incubator including, Content Translation, Section Translation, Wikidata etc . So far we have tested several hypothesis as defined in the 2024-24 Annual plan. Learnings from this experiment, highlighted that most of the test Wikipedias that were allowed to ‘graduate’ from the Incubator early and receive full production access were in fact experiencing decreased content editing activity except for Southern Ndebele and Iban.  We however learnt that the decline in edits was not limited to these wikis but to other wikis that have graduated recently for example Angika wikipedia created on 22nd March 2024 and Kusaal Wikipedia created on 24th April 2024 just to mention a few according to Wikimedia Stats .Digging up this further, we actually realised we already have 100+ wikipedias with 20 or less active contributors though some of them are spoken by many millions according to ethnologue.  Currently, despite wikis continuing to be onboarded to our platform , there is not yet a recommendation on how they can be sustainable in terms of improving in content. To begin drawing some learnings on some of these questions in 25/26 we will focus on supporting wikipedias with a smaller presence on the Wikimedia platform helping them to improve vital content. We will collaborate with Wikimedia Language communities and related stakeholders including Language Diversity Hub. Read more here about the context on some of the proposed ideas.L Let us know whether you are interested in collaborating and whether you have more ideas or whether you have thoughts on the proposed plan.

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.

8 languages added to Translatewiki

• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T390871Add Kihavu (hav) to translatewiki (Congo,Africa)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392242Add Sasak (sas) to translatewiki(Indonesia, Asia)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392236 Add Pazeh (pzh) to translatewiki(Taiwan, Asia)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392266Add Michif (crg) to translatewiki(Canada, North America)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T391731 Add Ho in Latin script (hoc-latn) to translatewiki(India, Asia)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T394068 Add Puno Quechua (qxp) to translatewiki(Peru, South America)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392255Add Rajasthani (raj) to translatewiki.net(India, Asia)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395396Add Dolgan (dlg) to translatewiki.net (Russia, Asia)

4 languages added to Names.php

• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T384245Add Lampung Api (ljp) to Names.php (Indonesia, Asia)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T384234 Add Wali (wlx) to Names.php (Ghana, Africa )
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T379137Add Hunde (hke) to Names.php (Congo, Africa)
• ✅Thttps://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T389916 Add Buginese (Buginese script) (bug-bugi) to Names.php (Indonesia, Asia)

Respond to language support requests through timely interventions and engagements to support Language communities to move towards their goals.

3 tickets on language codes, 2 tickets on Messages, 2 tickets on keyboard support, I ticket on plural support and 1 ticket on namespaces

• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T394876 Add ks to language-data, jquery.uls, ULS, core, CLDR. 
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T396082Fix redirects for Tunisian Arabic (aeb)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T394873 Fix redirects for az and azb languages(Volunteer contribution)

• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395359 Split bot password messages to a separate file
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T389491Fix GENDER and parameter usage in the message contributions-title

• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T391830Add Wali (wlx) characters to jquery.ime (Ghana, Africa)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T393745 Restore combined Javanese keyboard option (Javanese, Asia)(Volunteer contribution)

• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392999Add local plural rules for Ho language (hoc, hoc-latn)

• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T389644Configure namespaces for the Papiamento language (pap)

Additionally, engaged at 2 collaboration and engagement spaces; Language community meting and published a newsletter

• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T390337 Organize language community meeting (May 2025)
• ✅https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T390339Publish Quarterly "Language & Internationalization Newsletter" for April 2025