Tuesday, April 01, 2008

On the monthly Betawiki info

In March we had contributions in 186 languages in Betawiki. This is an increase of 30 languages over last month! The statistics for this month show a continued increase in all the relevant metrics; more languages support the most often used MediaWiki messages, more languages support the extensions.

The number of languages has increased by only one. This is also because for the first time two languages are no longer supported in BetaWiki. Middle Dutch and Old Norse are no longer supported in Betawiki. The decision to withdraw support was done by the Betawiki management :)

When you follow the project on a daily basis, the one thing that stands out is the support for the languages from India. I am impressed with the speed in which these languages have made their mark. With Hindi finally starting to move, we are slowly getting to the stage where we support most of the official languages of India.

The one thing that I will be watching closely is a request from the Greek localisers to have an approval process for new and changed localisations. The argument is that in this way it is possible to ensure consistent terminology and, to prevent dubious localisations to go life. The initial reply has been that Betawiki is a wiki too and that the process is an iterative process. Everyone can do the inital localisation and everyone can proof read and improve. "we are basically a do-ocracy. You do the work, you decide how it works." I read on IRC ...

What was agreed on is that features will be created to allow for an improved proof reading functionality, Nikerabbit has a Summer of Code project (not Google) to improve on the Betawiki functionality so I am sure that we will see loads of interesting changes in the future.
Thanks,
GerardM

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