Language Onboarding and Development/Get Involved
Get Involved
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As a volunteer contributing to this area, you will have multiple opportunities to learn, grow, and connect with others while contributing to the open knowledge movement!
Language communities often lack enough tech-savvy volunteers to address technical challenges for themselves and their communities, particularly in emerging languages. Only a few contributors know how to handle this work, and it can be overwhelming for them to meet all the technical needs of a community. Here is a quote from a Bangladeshi contributor:
"From my experience, I've seen that small Wikimedia communities struggle a lot with dev work or even MediaWiki configuration. My idea was to create a team with that capacity, directly receive requests from different Wikimedia communities, and work as a one-stop solution for light technical support on a rolling basis."
In this field of work, there are several ways you can engage as a volunteer:
Code Contribution: Develop an understanding of internationalization principles, tools, and best practices for creating multilingual software like MediaWiki, which can be adapted to various regions and cultures. Gain hands-on experience with open-source contributions, including making changes, submitting patches, and collaborating with other contributors on platforms like Gerrit and GitHub. If you are looking for technical tasks, check out the unassigned easy tasks in various language project repositories on Wikimedia Phabricator.
Community Meetings:
- Join quarterly language community meetings to connect with community members, share knowledge, ask questions, work on projects, and provide mutual support. Would you like to present at a future meeting? You can add your username to the Etherpad for the next meeting, and one of the organizers will follow up with you.
- Participate in internal hackathons for collaborative problem-solving on technical tasks.
- Conduct a local technical event in collaboration with local developer groups and Wikimedia communities focused on language technical support tasks. Looking for advice to get started? Create a request on Phabricator, and we will take it from there. See the example task and training resource on the right.
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Translations: Translate content and make it accessible in various languages.
- If you are looking for tools to edit and translate articles and interface messages, you can use Content translation and Special:Translate on translatewiki.net. These tools make it easier to work with content in different languages.
- Report feedback on the talk pages of language tools.
Language Onboarding: Are you involved in helping your language wiki grow content in Wikimedia Incubator and beyond? Check out some resources below:
- Incubator Help Manual
- Process for making requests for new languages
- List of Articles Every Wikipedia Should Have
- See a compilation on additional resources on a user's page
- Wiki features such as discussion tools, Universal Language Selector, Visual Editor, and Content Translation
- Translation/localization guidelines, including links to the most used/important messages on MediaWiki.org for translation on Translatewiki.net
- Mobile apps
- Indigenous Languages and Knowledge on Wikimedia Projects Toolbox
- How to test that your language works well on a wiki
- Starter Kit
Outreach: Subscribe to the Language and Internationalization newsletter to learn about new feature developments, improvements in various language-related technical projects, support work, and ideas for getting involved in contributing to these projects.
Advocacy: Secure dedicated support from experienced language specialists and developers in the Wikimedia Foundation and community to assist volunteers and advocate for the needs of technical users and contributors from language communities to relevant stakeholders (e.g., WMF Product/Tech teams). Engage in relevant venues such as community events, discussions on tasks in Phabricator, and creating tasks if they don’t exist by filing a bug report on Phabricator and tagging it with LPL Technical Support. See How to report a bug.
Partnerships: Are you part of a language diversity outreach initiative, tools development project, or university program and would like to collaborate with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Language and Onboarding Support area to make them accessible to Wikimedia projects globally (e.g., keyboards and proofing tools)? Get in touch by starting a discussion on the talk page here.