Wikimedia Language engineering/Wikimania2013/Event Report

Event Report - Wikimania 2013, Hong Kong

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team attended the DevCamp and Wikimania, held in Hong Kong from August 7 to August 11, 2013. The accomplishments, discussions and other notes of relevance from the sessions and informal interactions are documented in this page.

Language Engineering meet-up - Dev-Camp (day 1)

• • Runa presented a brief roundup about the recent projects of the Language Engineering team and spoke about the upcoming Language Dashboard (an ongoing GSoC project) and the Language Maven program.
  • Pau presented an overview of the initial design of the content translation workflow prototype and invited users to test the prototype. Three users tried the prototype after the session and provided useful feedback on the proposed design ideas.
  • Amir Aharoni showcased the RTL problems that were recently resolved in the Visual Editor (as part of an ongoing GSoC project).
  • Yuvi Panda spoke about the MoreLangs keyboard mobile app that provides the JQuery.ime input methods on Android phones.
  • André Costa (and Lionslayer signed up as our first Language Mavens from the Swedish and Burmese communities.
  • We also exchanged notes with Google's i18n engineer Ben on better understanding issues that surface from languages with smaller or not-very-prominent user communities.

Takeaway from the Sessions

List of talks presented by the team at the conference

The language engineers were present during all the sessions of the Language track. Further discussions were done offline on possible areas of collaboration (particularly content translation) with the 'Translators without Borders' team and also with Marek Blahuš, who spoke about translating Featured Articles.

Translation Sprint

A translation sprint also took place during the conference. Users attending the session used the Translate extension to create translations on Meta Wiki and translatewiki.net. Many users learnt how to provide translations to MediaWiki and other open source project. Since several users attended the conference with a tablet device instead of a laptop it was a good opportunity to see the translation tool working on touch devices. Despite the typing-intensive nature of translation and some lack of support for some scripts of mobile operating systems, most users were also able to contribute their translations using touch devices.

Enhancements to language resources (DevCamp and Conference days)

• Chinese Collation and sorting was discussed with Liangent. She provided insights on the indexing that will help with sorting categories and other information for Chinese. Additionally, she also provided inputs on appropriate selection of regional variants for articles in the Chinese Wikipedia that are annotated to display such variants. [Blog upcoming]
• Javanese language discussions with Benny Lin. More details in the blog post
• Esperanto Tests
  • with Marek Blahuš. It's useful because it will allow to deprecate the ancient Esperanto x-substitution in core MW.
• Kyrgyz keyboard addition
  • with Tynchtykbek Chorotegin, thanks to talk by Niklas and Amir
• Suggestion for adding another Bengali font - AdosrshiLipi (Bug 52719)
• Gujarati keyboard fixes: Inscript 2 (Thanks to Arnav Sonara) and Phonetic