Advertise the heroes of Open Content, Free Software

The Serbian #Wikimedia chapter had reached a deal to show people relevant to the good cause on billboards in Serbia. These posters are put on when a contract for a specific time for a commercial posting has ended.

It is nice to see our good friends Jimmy and Richard together promoting the good cause.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Approved bug 46247

Brion has approved bug 46247. This bug is about gender. You will be asked to indicate your gender on the preferences. You may prefer to leave it as "not indicated".

There are people who object to collecting irrelevant information and to them I want to say that it is very relevant for many of our Wikipedias. In many languages, particularly the Slavic languages, a male is addressed differently from a female. It is considered impolite to address either in the wrong way. It is for this reason that a request was made to support gender where this matters in the messaging of our MediaWiki software.

The software written by Nikerabbit creates the mechanism whereby a message can be different based on the knowledge of the sex of our public. This does not mean at all that our messages have been changed. We do not even know what languages will make use of our new gender support.

What we have in front of us is that people will proof read the MediaWiki messages and decide that a specific message needs to be made gender aware. They will change the message. For the other languages we will need a bot to FUZZY that message so that people can make the changes for their language as well.

Betawiki now has more then 1000 volunteers working on localisation. Particularly for the languages that want gender support it will be hard work; the first messages will come fast. The ratings for these languages will suffer and slowly but surely the gender support will improve.

The Betawiki developers put a lot of effort in assessing new and changed messages. They now have the added burden of indicating what messages need gender support. What we hope for is that one of our Slavic volunteers steps up to the plate and slowly but surely becomes a Betawiki developer.
Thanks,
GerardM

Comparing former Yugoslav localisations

I was asked if I could write with some regularity something about localisation for a Serbian public. So I am looking more with more interest at the Serbian effort in Betawiki.  I find that there is enough to write about..

When you compare the localisation of these closely related languages, I find that the Serbian language is not keeping up with the others. In a way it is not that easy because there is both the Latin and the Cyrillic script that is to be maintained. The number of articles would have it that the amount of attention the Serbian Wikipedia is getting is much bigger.

bs	Bosanski	100.00%	99.91%	100.00%	39.12%	12.07%	26,057
hr	Hrvatski	100.00%	99.45%	94.58%	35.74%	41.72%	54,003
mk	Македонски	100.00%	98.67%	25.72%	18.78%	74.83%	23,626
sr-ec	ћирилица	100.00%	89.44%	65.61%	23.88%	63.79%	70,702
sr-el	latinica	79.34%	57.72%	7.85%	3.78%	0.34%	70,702

Localisation is one of the most important usability factors. It is one of the few things that our communities can do to improve the user experience; localisation and writing the best articles. The rest is in the hands of the developers.
Thanks,
      GerardM