Localisation not just for the software

From Devwiki

Gerard Meijssen

With localisation an environment is made usable for people who use a different language or are used to different ways of presentation. This is typically associated with software. However an environment like Commons needs localisation as much as it is there to be used by people from all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

This talk will present the status of Betawiki and will demonstrate functionality to localise Commons.

Localisation of software is an important factor in making projects succeed. With localisation it is easier to get people to collaborate in our projects. Betawiki is the project where the 250+ languages are localised in a specialised environment. Not only MediaWiki but also the many MediaWiki extensions are localised here. By localising centrally, all WMF projects are updated when the localisations are submitted from SVN.

Commons as a project is hardly usable for people that do not read English. The lack of language support is an important factor in getting more pictures and finding more users. With financial support from Digitale Pioniers, we are working on software that will localise Commons. This localisation will be done by associating pictures with placeholders. These placeholders will show the word in the language of a user when a translation is available.

In this way we will extend the usability of Commons and make it a more inviting project for people that do not read English.