Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Reportcards for each #Wikipedia language

One of the Wikipedia birthday gifts is a page with reportcards for the Indic languages. Inspired by the wonderful work by Shiju Alex, Erik Zachte prepared "at a glance" information. This is really helpful when you try to understand the vitality of particular projects.

Both for the Malayalam and the Myanmar Wikipedia there are issues with entering text properly in the Wiki. This has been largely solved locally at the Malayalam Wikipedia with an option that allows you to pick one of three choices.


Once issues with writing articles are resolved locally, it becomes clear that a similar solution is needed for Commons and wikis external to the WMF. Support for input methods has to be available together with the localisation.

At the Amsterdam hackathon, we discussed this and there is active support not only for supporting input methods in core but also for providing Indian developers with access to the MediaWiki code repository.

Providing support for input methods for the Myanmar language is critical when the Myanmar Wikipedia is to prosper and grow. When it is to be read, serving its content in both the mutually exclusive fonts from the same source would be a momentous improvement.

There is an understanding how we can move forward. The people who know how are invited to become MediaWiki hackers and they are invited to work together for an optimal result.
Thanks,
       GerardM

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