On the monthly Betawiki info

April has been another good month at Betawiki. This month we started to support two more languages. Eleven more languages now have basic support; as a consequence, a third of the languages MediaWiki supports, are usable when you do not know another language.

When you look at all MediaWiki messages, the increase is not that big. To understand this, you have to appreciate that there were many changed and new messages due to the ongoing MediaWiki development. When you look at the extensions, you find that both the WMF used extensions and the other extensions show a healthy growth.

The major event this month was the first "language pack", it allows people who run the 1.12 stable version of MediaWiki to update the localisations. I only recently realised how different our software development is; typically localisers get into the act once the coding of all the new functionality is done. MediaWiki is different; the WMF projects always run the "bleeding edge" software and consequently there is a constant need to maintain the localisation. This makes localising MediaWiki much more of a challenge. The release of a new version is typically a major event, for MediaWiki it is something that is done as well ...

Some factoids:

• New projects are once again created; sadly a new version of the GFDL has not yet been released
• There are currently 1908 messages in MediaWiki. Release 1.12 has 1768 messages - an 8% increase
  
• Siebrand's insane goals for 2008 are starting to look more realistic, even achievable....

Thanks,
GerardM