WMF membership with Unicode Consortium

The Wikimedia Foundation has become one of the 30+ organisational members of the Unicode Consortium. This membership is for a period of 1 year. It allows us to be better aware of issues about language support and scripts which are relevant for our projects and tools. Through this relationship we also will be able to act as a connecting voice between our movement and the Consortium.

About the Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded in 1991, dedicated to developing and maintaining universal and open source character encoding standards. Their work goes beyond character encoding to include character properties, algorithms, language and data for internationalization, and software libraries to support these standards. The above work are done by corporations, governments, research and educational institutions, industry groups and associations, and individuals who are leaders in internationalization, fonts, rendering, and all aspects of text processing. The Wikimedia Foundation has never held a membership with the Consortium until now, but has participated in Unicode projects, discussion forums, and conferences in the past.

Benefits of our membership

As an associate level member, we hope to establish increased connections with the Consortium and represent Wikimedia's needs with clarity and planning. For the coming year we intend to do the following:

• Advocate for language support issues important to our work and languages
• Participate in relevant Unicode discussions
• Stay informed about upcoming changes within Unicode projects
• Contribute to conversations on character encoding and language support

Co-ordination group

Within the Wikimedia Foundation’s Product and Technology department, we have formed an initial working group of staff to kick off the coordination process. These are individuals who have worked on Unicode projects, experienced in the domain of internationalization, and are already aware of language support topics that have been brought forward by the communities over the years.

As a next step the group would like to establish a conversation space for communities' insights and experiences with language issues on Wikimedia projects that are directly connected to Unicode standards or projects. To do so, we would like to invite you to connect with us on the talk page. We will collaboratively review the issues and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium. Similarly we will offer insights from discussions with the Consortium. Going forward we would like to learn better how we can improve this arrangement for more voices from the communities to join the discussions on this page as well as in forums with the Consortium.

Members

The WMF staff members who are part of the coordination group are:

• Amir Aharoni
• Denny Vrandečić
• Nat Baca
• Runa Bhattacharjee
• Santhosh Thottingal

Several other WMF staff members are actively supporting this group during discussions and planning.

Expectations

While we're excited about this opportunity, we must understand that we cannot guarantee that the Consortium will address all issues or prioritise to resolve them faster than usual. Our membership is for one year, with a possibility of renewal if it is proven that our membership is impactful and viable to effectively support community and project needs.

We look forward to leveraging this membership to improve language support in our products and to represent our community's needs in the broader Unicode ecosystem.