Congratulations :)

The German #Wikipedia has its 1.000.000th article. It is celebrated by making a quilt of illustrations ...
Thanks,
      GerardM

A nice Christmas present

Today the Picard Wikipedia is being created. By Christmas time it will be operational ...
Thanks !!
      GerardM

Update on the Hausa localisation

Sometimes it is the little things that make you happy.. One such is the MediaWiki localisation of the Hausa language. The Hausa Wikipedia has been slumbering for a long long time. It is only recently that we learned that there was no localisation at all.

This month Mlandanali started his contributions. Today he passed the 50% of the most used messages. Traffic for the Hausa language has grown 147% the last year to some 52K a month and there are currently 153 articles up from 43 last year.

When you consider that Hausa is one of the top 50 languages in number of speakers, it is significant. It is an autonomous growth and that makes it extra nice.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Understanding the Commons licenses

When you upload images to Commons, a lot of information needs to be provided before those images are completely secure. Essential to Commons is the choice of one of the permissible licenses, essential because Commons aims to be a resource exclusively of freely licensed media files.

As many people do not speak English, you will find that they do not participate on Commons. That is a shame because they typically represent countries and cultures that are not well covered in both our Wikipedias and Commons.

Translating those license texts is one of the obvious aids in helping out. This is already done on Commons, using the Commons community. I am really happy to learn that moves are under way to bring such texts to translatwiki.net and leverage that great community of translators.

Licenses are not only relevant to Commons, there are many more situations where these texts are relevant. Growing the number of freely licensed applications that are supported at translatewiki.net will make sure that more of those commonalities will be found and, this means that these texts can be re-used.

Growing the number of applications and growing the community of translators at translatewiki.net makes it possible to share localisations, makes it possible to support your language and you applications with one effective interface.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The "popularity" of #wikipedia projects

We aim to bring encyclopaedic knowledge to all people with our Wikipedias. Many if not most of the people do not speak the language of one of our ten most popular projects. These ten languages do not include Chinese and Hindi, to name just two and get at this moment 91,18% of our traffic.

The Chinese Wikipedia used to be the eleventh in traffic, but this month the Turkish Wikipedia attracts more eyeballs. In a similar way, the Macedonian Wikipedia proved more popular then the Hindi Wikipedia since a couple of months. Chinese grew 20% and Hindi grew 95% on a yearly basis .. REALLY respectable !!

When you look at the table and check out the statistics, you will find that there are many Wikipedias doing really, really well. It shows because they are outgrowing the top 10 Wikipedias. As I have said in the past, with a bit of luck, they will have together 85% of our traffic in five years..
Thanks,
GerardM

End of year translationrally at #translatewiki.net

It is that time of year again, translatewiki.net has its end of year translation rally again. Nine hundred EURO will be divided among all the localisers who complete 500 new MediaWiki messages or more and one hundred EURO will be divided between the two people who finish the most new messages.

The last month has been a good one at translatewiki.net, we have had new people starting for languages like Hausa, Igbo and Kalaallisut. Languages like Macedonian and Indonesian have been doing really well. Our hope is that many people will find their way to translatewiki.net and push the quality and quantity of our MediaWiki localisations so that all the Wikimedia Foundation projects will look even better going into the new year.
Thanks,
     GerardM

LocalisationUpdate updates again

Today I learned from Roan that the LocalisationUpdate process had been broken for some time for extension messages. It probably broke while doing an "SVN update" on November 19th. This has now been fixed.

Since the last update of the MediaWiki software on all projects, 24090 localised messages have been added. You can find a breakdown per language here.

In order to be sure that we have all the possible messages available from LocalisationUpdate, Roan has triggered a full upgrade for all the message files. This was done by removing the "hash values" for the message files.
Thanks,
       GerardM