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Wikimedia Language and Product Localization

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Language and Product Localization is a team within Wikimedia Foundation’s Product and Technology department. The mission of the Language and Product Localization team is to ensure standards based tooling to support multilingualism within the Wikimedia movement, and advance localized technical initiatives to reduce knowledge gaps and promote language equity.

We are a globally distributed team with members located across various countries. The team has a combined working knowledge of about 25 languages.

This team has been formed by combining the WMF Inuka team (formed in 2019) and WMF Language team (formed in 2011).

What we do

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Wikimedia projects are one of the most multilingual websites on the internet, of which Wikipedias are the largest, with over 300 language editions. The tools created and maintained by the Language and Product Localization team facilitate the use of languages on websites using MediaWiki. We provide robust tools for localization, and translation that have been used to create more than million new articles on Wikipedia. We engage closely with the Wikimedia project communities to create features and provide technical support to help advance their work towards knowledge building and sharing. More about: Localization (L10n) and Internationalization (i18n)

With millions of people coming online for the first time in recent years, it is imperative that our projects support and welcome newer users with access to knowledge and language equity that matches how they create and consume content on the internet. Our aim is to build localized innovations and foster support systems to meet the changing knowledge needs.

Team

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Product and Design

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Engineering

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Language Technical Support and Outreach

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Data and Analytics

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Projects

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Features

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  • Content translation – The content translation tool assists multilingual editors to translate Wikipedia articles. Hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles have been created with the tool. It makes the process faster and easier, resulting in articles more likely to survive community review. Recent development, under the Section translation name, expanded the initial capabilities to support expanding existing articles by translating an article section on mobile. Read more .
  • Translate – Translate extension is a feature-rich extension that lets users translate software strings and pages in their browser. For both software and page translation, it supports translation memory, statistics by group and language, advanced grammar support for multiple languages, and more.
  • Wikipedia Preview allows Wikipedia content to be available as contextual information on 3rd party websites. Wikipedia Preview on partner websites would allow their readers to gain context while reading their pages and help people gain contextual knowledge from Wikipedia without necessarily clicking through to Wikipedia and learn more on Wikipedia with the option being available to read more on Wikipedia. Similar to page previews but for external sites. The code can be integrated into the site, or, if the external site uses WordPress, then they can use the WordPress plugin at https://wordpress.org/plugins/wikipedia-preview/.
  • Universal Language Selector – Universal Language Selector (ULS) provides a flexible method of selecting and configuring a language to use in the user interface. It provides options to select fonts and input method. Languages can be searched using the ISO language code, with language names written in the current user interface language or in its own script (autonym). Depending upon the user's location or the browser/operating system's language, the user interface language will be suggested. Cross-language searches – using any script – can also be done. Read more.
  • MinT (Machine in Translation) is a machine translation service based on open-source neural machine translation models. The service is hosted in the Wikimedia Foundation infrastructure, and it runs translation models that have been released by other organizations with an open-source license. An open machine translation service can be a key piece of the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge. Read More.
  • Translation suggestions: Topic-based & Community-defined lists is a test project to improve the translation suggestion feature in the Content Translation tool to validate or invalidate two hypothesis (WE2.12 and WE2.1.4) from the WMF 2024-25 Annual Plan Work. Read more .

Libraries

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  • Project Milkshake aims to make generic JavaScript components for commonly needed internationalization feature components that have been developed for use through MediaWiki in Wikimedia projects. These include input methods, web fonts, and grammatical rules for languages. For easy participation and wider adoption, the source-code repositories are hosted on GitHub and the components have been dual-licensed as GPL and MIT.
    • jQuery.uls – Fully featured language selector that scales to hundreds of languages.
    • jQuery.ime – More than 150 input methods in various languages are provided through jQuery.ime; many of these methods have been contributed by the Wikimedia community. See Demo.
    • banana-i18n – This library provides internationalization elements to support grammatical rules for languages, including rules for plural forms and gender.
    • jQuery.i18n – This library is deprecated in favor of banana-i18n and is now in maintenance mode. See Prototype.
    • jQuery.webfonts – jQuery.webfonts uses the WebFonts technology to allow the usage of fonts from a font repository. This eliminates dependency on system fonts while viewing pages in those languages. Read more about webfonts.
  • Language data library provides essential language data for hundreds of languages: autonyms, scripts, writing directions. This is useful for building language selectors or tagging language content with correct writing directions.
  • Wikipedia Preview allows Wikipedia content to be available as contextual information on 3rd party websites. Wikipedia Preview on partner websites would allow their readers to gain context while reading their pages and help people gain contextual knowledge from Wikipedia without necessarily clicking through to Wikipedia and learn more on Wikipedia with the option being available to read more on Wikipedia. Similar to page previews but for external sites. The code can be integrated into the site, or, if the external site uses WordPress, then they can use the WordPress plugin at https://wordpress.org/plugins/wikipedia-preview/.

Other Projects

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  • MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle1 is a collection of selected MediaWiki extensions needed by any wiki that wants to be multilingual. It follows a quarterly release cycle.
  • Most Wikimedia software is translated by volunteer translators at translatewiki.net. We support translatewiki.net maintenance and development and ensures that translation are made available to Wikimedia software projects swiftly and reliably.
  • Wikistories lets editors create short, visual and reliable knowledge from Wikipedia for quick consumption and easy sharing.
    • Wiki-Highlights is a test project to validate or invalidate a hypothesis that if the global youth are offered automated, human-reviewed, visual articles as an alternative reading experience in third-party platforms, then we will increase their awareness and engagement of Wikimedia projects as readers and contributors. Wiki-Highlights continues the concept of creating short, visual and reliable knowledge that was started in the Wikistories project.
  • Phonos is an extension created by Community Tech from the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey and now maintained by us.

More details of how we maintain the different projects can be found in:

  • Our statement of intent for code review
  • Our maintenance levels and responsibilities in Phabricator

Technical Support

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We work closely with language communities where timely interventions and engagements are needed to support internationalization and localisation workflows and products to help these communities to keep them moving to achieve their goals.

It should be as easy to consume and contribute useful knowledge in all the world’s languages as it is in the largest ones. We will work closely with the Wikimedia communities about language- and region-specific needs within the products intended for multilingual use. We identify gaps in product workflows and periodically report the findings that affect use and growth of the product in certain languages or regions, and surface special needs that are necessary for a uniform multilingual product experience. More about this work

WMF Annual Plan Work - FY2024-25

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For the fiscal year 2024-25 that begins on July 1st, 2024, the Language and Product Localization team will have planned activities in alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan guided by the movement's 2030 Strategic Direction. As part of the WMF Product and Technology department we will pursue planned objectives and key results under the Equity Goal to support the technology needs of the Wikimedia movement centering on knowledge gaps and content growth. We will be partnering with the Community Growth team that is part of the WMF Advancement department. Updates about the annual planned work can be found in our newsletter onwards from July 2024.

Objective

(Wiki Experiences 2/Knowledge Equity)

Notes
Communities are supported to effectively close knowledge gaps through tools and support systems that are easier to access, adapt, and improve, ensuring increased growth in trustworthy encyclopedic content.
Key Results and Hypothesis for FY24-25 Q1 and Q2
WE 2.1 By the end of Q2, support organizers, contributors, and institutions to increase the coverage of quality content in key topic areas i.e. Gender (women's health, women's biographies), and Geography (biodiversity) by 138 articles through experiments.
WE2.1.1 If we build a country-level inference model for Wikipedia articles, we will be able to filter lists of articles to those about a specific region with >70% precision and >50% recall. [1]
WE2.1.2 If we build a proof-of-concept providing translation suggestions that are based on user-selected topic areas, we will be set up to successfully test whether translators will find more opportunities to translate in their areas of interest and contribute more compared to the generic suggestions currently available. [2]
WE2.1.3 If we offer list-making as a service, we’ll enable at least 5 communities to make more targeted contributions in their topic areas as measured by (1) change in standard quality coverage of relevant topics on the relevant wiki and (2) a brief survey of organizer satisfaction with topic area coverage on-wiki.
WE2.1.4 If we developed a proof of concept that adds translation tasks sourced from WikiProjects and other list-building initiatives, and present them as suggestions within the CX mobile workflow, then more editors would discover and translate articles focused on topical gaps. [4]
WE 2.2 By the end of Q2, implement and test two recommendations, both social and technical, to support languages onboarding for small language communities, with an evaluation to analyze community feedback.
WE2.2.1 If we expand Wikimedia's State of Languages data by securing data sharing agreements with UNESCO and Ethnologue, at least one partner will decide to represent Wikimedia’s language inclusion progress in their own data products and communications. On top of being useful to our partner institutions, our expanded dataset will provide important contextual information for decision-making and provide communities with information needed to identify areas for intervention.
WE2.2.2 If we map the language documentation activities that Wikimedians have conducted in the last 2 years, we will develop a data-informed baseline for community experiences in onboarding new languages.
WE2.2.3 If we provide production wiki access to 5 new languages, with or without Incubator, we will learn whether access to a full-fledged wiki with modern features such as those available on English Wikipedia (including ContentTranslation and Wikidata support, advanced editing and search results) aids in faster editing. Ultimately, this will inform us if this approach can be a viable direction for language onboarding for new or existing languages, justifying further investigation. [4]

Community Space

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We welcome you to collaborate with us and share on our team talk page ideas/features we should consider developing.

For Readers, editors, translators

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For Developers

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  • If you have found an issue or want to suggest a new feature:
    • Report issues and feature requests about MediaWiki internationalization and MediaWiki extensions to Phabricator
    • Report issues and feature requests about Milkshake libraries to their GitHub pages
    • You can fix translation mistakes yourself by signing up on translatewiki:translatewiki.net
    • Use Support page on Translatewiki.net for translation-related errors, bugs or functionality issues.
  • If you are an user, developer or system administrator and need support with a specific project, use the talk page for that project in this wiki. Do read the help pages first.
  • If you are looking for technical tasks, take a look at the easy tasks that haven't been assigned yet in various language project repositories on Wikimedia Phabricator.
  • Help write unit tests for input methods
  • If you are contributing patches to our repositories, see our code review statement of intent.

Follow our work and connect with us

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  • Join our Language community meetings
  • Subscribe to our newsletter for project updates, annual plan progress and community event reports.
  • Wikimedia blog posts of diff
  • Contact us on our team's talk page or the talk pages for our projects!
  • If you want to contact the Wikimedia Language and Product Localization team about language support and translation topics, you can reach out to us via #wikimedia-language connect on Libera Chat IRC or Telegram group – these two are mirrored to each other. This is a good place to ask for quick advice, or notify us about important matters.
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