Language tools

The Language team has the goal of reducing the language barrier that users face when accessing or sharing knowledge. The team has created tools to facilitate the participation of our users regardless of their language. These include the creation of multilingual content and software, facilitate language navigation, and support for easy input and proper display of different scripts. Language tools and their infrastructures need regular maintenance and update efforts. Making our language tools and infrastructure work better helps all the projects that rely on them, and saves time and efforts to the people participating in them, from developers to translators and the final users.

In July 2018, an effort was started to identify key areas to improve in our language tools during the upcoming months. The affected tools, the plan and the status updates are described next.

List of tools

Language tools are listed below:

• Translate extension. The infrastructure used to translate our software and multilingual pages. Communities of translators use it on translatewiki.net and Wikimedia Meta-wiki.
• Universal Language selector. Provides easy access to language settings, and facilitates language selection in different contexts including interlanguage links.
• Project Milkshake. Developer libraries for internationalisation support on the web including input methods, web-fonts, and grammatical rules for languages that can be used on both Wikimedia and external projects.
• MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle. A collection of selected MediaWiki extensions needed by any wiki which desires to be multilingual.
• Content Translation. The tool to facilitate translation of Wikipedia articles across languages. Since it is in active development, the progress of this tool won't be tracked as part of the current maintenance effort, but as part of its own project page for the new version.

Maintenance plan

Since there is a wide catalog of language tools and potential areas to improve we plan to operate in the following way:

1. Language tools audit. Identify areas and their potential impact in order to have clarity on the areas we want to focus our maintenance work regarding language tools.
2. Get feedback. Share our plans and get input from the different people involved, including the users of the tools and people working in other Wikimedia projects.
3. Work on the selected areas. Once areas are identified and the people involved are in the same page, the Language team will work on the areas defined.

Your input is important in this process, so feel free to add your comments to the talk page.

Status updates

September 2019

• Export repo migration for Encyclopedia of Life project.
• Avoid running Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM) specific tests when such virtual machine is not used.
• Deprecation alerts as part of the migration process to use the new registration system for extensions.
• Improved support for moving translated categories and database load balancing.

August 2019

• Improvements in the sign up process for Translate extension
• Fixed issues that made documentation for translations link to the wrong namespace, and issues from deprecated parsing functions.
• Better alignment with new standards by using the new extension registration system for Translate and for translatewiki.net, avoid using deprecated functions when moving translatable pages, and fixing issues with export functions on new PHP versions and the Hip Hop virtual machine (HHVM).

July 2019

• Improved translation message integrity by supporting custom checks with a new validation framework.
• More fluent account creation process by better communicating the wait to the user and making username available for previously rejected user applications.
• Better support for exporting by preventing issues with empty groups of messages to translate and support for Phabricator translations.

May 2019

• More reliable sharing/bookmarking of messages to translate by ensuring the link considers the current language when it changes.
• Better support for source language by preventing actions that do not apply such as proofreading, or changing the translation status.
• More clarity to communicate priority languages by showing a proper notice when translation to non-priority languages is blocked, avoid showing the message when already translating to a priority language, avoid showing the notice when translating documentation, and including also other languages in the stats.
• Better support for importing translation updates by clarifying the possible merge actions, and the link to import pre-existing translations.
• More reliable language selection by avoiding Simple English to be missing in the interlanguage links when it should be available.

April 2019

• Improved font support for Church Slavonic.

February 2019

• Better handling of searches with a large number of results.

January 2019

• More reliable update for translation statistics.

December 2018

• Support for Microsoft translation restored.
• Message group stats improvements to include review stats and avoid timeout errors.
• More reliably showing the progress of translations.

November 2018

• Improvements on code review infrastructure to prevent false positives in code review.
• Improvements in the list of message groups to provide more clarity by adjusting the colors.
• Better support for moving translatable sub-pages by avoiding moves to affect the parent page.
• Better proofreading support by avoiding translations to be automatically marked as reviewed when they are not.
• More reliable access to message groups by avoiding errors due to the truncation of long IDs, improved query performance, and avoided warnings.

October 2018

• More reliable support for moving and deleting translated pages.

September 2018

• List of proposed interventions documented on wiki for discussion.

July 2018

• Initial discussion on initial potential areas based on the Language goals and whishlist page.