English: Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia in the world. With more than 32 million articles in over 280 languages, Wikipedia's network of language-specific MediaWiki sites has become an important global resource for the preservation and distribution of knowledge. If you look at how Wikipedia's content is distributed across these language-specific sites, however, you find that much of it is only available in a few “major” languages, with English having by far the most content. At the same time, there is also content found only in smaller Wikipedia language editions that really deserves a wider audience. In order for different language communities to be able to share content with each other, we need to provide their multilingual users with a quick and easy way to translate content found in one Wikipedia language edition and then publish the result in another Wikipedia language edition. This is where the MediaWiki Content Translation extension comes in.

The MediaWiki Content Translation (CX) extension provides a community’s multilingual users with an array of translation tools they can use to bootstrap the creation of new articles in their target language from existing articles in related source languages. These tools are powered by a set of integrated translation services that are potentially adaptable to other Wikimedia projects. The extension is currently being made available as a beta feature for a limited set of test languages that includes Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese. More languages are planned to be added in the future based on community interest, impact and various technical criteria.

This talk will give an overview of the MediaWiki Content Translation extension’s key features and describe its general architecture. The focus will be on identifying the problems Content Translation is meant to solve, explaining how we have attempted to solve these problems and discussing the value the extension can add to Wikipedia and other MediaWiki based projects.