This is a big deal! Wikia is after the Wikimedia Foundation, the biggest user of the MediaWiki software. It hosts over 60,000 wikis, has over 3 million content pages and is with 30+ million visitors per month a top 100 world website.
With Wikia making use of translatewiki.net, 68 MediaWiki new extensions are gaining internationalisation and localisation support. For Wikia this is in addition to the 24+ extensions that are already supported at translatewiki.net.
As you may know, the extensions developed by Wikia are as much Open Source as all the other MediaWiki extensions. With the internationalisation and localisation happening by the same community, the same best practices will be used. This means that plural and gender support will become available in the Wikia software, I am sure that this will have its impact on coding practices.
Languages like Kotava may now get active support. Wikia supports more languages, it will be interesting to see how they will be fitted in.
I hope that other companies who provide MediaWiki hosting or products will be interested, it is for them to consider their localisation support. What makes translatewiki.net so valuable is its community. It is not easy to build your own.
Thanks,
GerardM
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