The Language Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation works on a set of tasks every two weeks. This post is about the team’s accomplishment over the past two weeks. You can also check the slides of our demonstration.
jQuery.ime: Wikimedia wikis use Extension:Narayam to support input of non-Latin text. As part of Project Milkshake, jQuery.ime is a generic input method tool ported from Narayam, which can be used even outside the Wikimedia universe. We have completed the development of jQuery.ime and this example demonstrates the plugin in action. It supports over 60 input methods across 32 languages. There is detailed technical specification and we welcome you to try out and contribute to the project by creating new input methods or reporting bugs. The next phase will be to integrate jQuery.ime with Universal Language Selector.
Internationalization requirements for VisualEditor: The VisualEditor will change the Mediawiki editing interface in a major way, making it much more user friendly. The Language Engineering team has a keen interest in making sure the VisualEditor supports all languages. We have written detailed Internationationalization and Bidirectional text requirements for the Visual Editor to support all languages, including right to left languages. Other available documents are a general test document, right to left test and Indic tests for testing input method compatibility with VisualEditor. Do perform these tests for your language and report bugs if you find them.
India Events: The Language Engineering team will be in India in early November participating in the OpenSource Language Summit in Pune and the Wikimedia DevCamp in Bangalore. If you are a developer interested in working on language related tools or Wikimedia Mobile, please sign up for the DevCamp. We will also meet up with community and talk about Language Engineering tools at the Language Engineering meetups in Pune and Bangalore. If you’re near, please sign up and we’ll see you there!
In brief:
- Universal Language Selector got some bug fixes, including scrolling, choosing fonts, and it is now fully internationalized.
- As mentioned in the previous blogpost, We have completed integrating Extension:Translate with CentralNotice. Some patch sets are awaiting code review. Unfortunately this feature might be missing in this year’s fundraising translations, due to other fundraising priorities.
- We held IRC office hours (log) on October 17th. The next session is on November 21st.
Srikanth Lakshmanan
Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer