IRC office hours/Office hours 2012-04-18

Time: 1800-1900 UTC, April 18th 2012
Location: #wikimedia-office
(09:30:42 AM) siebrand: Welcome to the Localisation team office hours of April 2012.
(09:30:52 AM) siebrand: We will be holding office hours every third Wednesday of the month at this time to make things a little more predictable.
(09:30:54 AM) Theo10011: <applause>
(09:31:05 AM) siebrand: This meeting lasts about an hour and will end at 17:30 UTC.
(09:31:13 AM) siebrand: I'll provide you with some news and topics for this meeting first.
(09:31:20 AM) siebrand: After that, we'll hopefully have a great Q&A session.
(09:31:25 AM) siebrand: Please hold your questions until after the introduction.
(09:31:30 AM) siebrand: If you want to ask questions now, please do ask them in a private message to alolita.
(09:31:38 AM) siebrand: Many of our team members are present today, so we're ready for loads of interaction again!
(09:31:49 AM) siebrand: GerardM-, Nikerabbit (Niklas), aharoni (Amir), pginer (Pau), alolita, santhosh, planemad (Arun) and myself are the ones I have identified so far.
(09:32:15 AM) siebrand: There are two new faces on the team since our last office hours in February (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2012-02-21 ).
(09:32:26 AM) siebrand: Pau Giner, from Valencia, Spain, is working for the Localisation team 20 hours a week as an interaction designer. He's the guy tasked with making things work well and intuitively, and make it look nice in the process. He started last month.
(09:32:33 AM) siebrand: Pau's main task at the moment is working on the Unified Language Selector.
(09:32:42 AM) alolita: yay Pau!
(09:32:44 AM) siebrand: You can read more about it on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector.
(09:32:46 AM) siebrand: The language selector is one of the main topics of this office hours.
(09:32:51 AM) siebrand: Arun Ganesh, from Bangalore, India, is a user interface designer. He's working four days a week for the Localisation team. His job is to make our deliverables look nicer, or make them have some user interface design in the first place.
(09:33:02 AM) alolita: yay Arun!
(09:33:04 AM) planemad_: Thanks siebrand. Hi all :)
(09:33:17 AM) pginer: Hi everybody!
(09:33:23 AM) siebrand: He's working with Pau on the language selector, and as a side project, he's doing a usability analysis of the translation workflow of the Translate extension.
(09:33:33 AM) siebrand: Welcome to you both! They'll be telling a little more about themselves when I'm done with the introduction.
(09:33:41 AM) siebrand: So we're the Localisation team. We deal with internationalization and localization issues, or more accessible, I usually refer to it as "language support". We have a team page at
(09:33:46 AM) siebrand: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Localisation_team.
(09:34:09 AM) siebrand: Our team's mission is basically that we aim to provide everyone in the world with a local language experience that is equal to that of the one in English in every aspect of the Wikimedia universe. I say mission, because we're quite far from that.
(09:34:20 AM) siebrand: We currently have four main areas of attention, input support, output support, language support for the core of MediaWIki, and localisation and translation, but the scope can be a lot wider at times.
(09:34:29 AM) siebrand: Our topics for today are:
(09:34:37 AM) siebrand: Language support and language support teams
(09:34:43 AM) siebrand: Internationalisation of MediaWiki
(09:34:55 AM) siebrand: User Interaction and User Interface design for language tools, mainly the Universal Language Selector.
(09:35:06 AM) siebrand: Okay, wow. That was my (prepared) introduction.
(09:35:34 AM) siebrand: Now I want to give some room to first planemad_ and then pginer to tell a little more about themselves.
(09:36:28 AM) planemad_: hi all, im arun ganesh
(09:36:44 AM) planemad_: i've been a wikipedian since 2005
(09:36:57 AM) abartov_ is now known as abartov
(09:37:00 AM) planemad_: contributing a lot of maps and images on commons
(09:37:11 AM) planemad_: i also love making things simple to use and understand
(09:37:32 AM) planemad_: since i'm not a big fan of complexity and like to keep my life simple :)
(09:38:14 AM) planemad_: since i'm a wikipedian and an interaction designer, i have quite a lot of ideas on improving the whole ux
(09:38:30 AM) planemad_: which i'm hoping to kick into action over the coming months
(09:39:12 AM) planemad_: i'll be publicly logging my work, so if anyone wants to know what i'm upto: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Planemad/Work/log
(09:39:22 AM) alolita: <applause>
(09:39:31 AM) planemad_: thats pretty much it :)
(09:40:05 AM) pginer: I'm Pau Giner
(09:40:10 AM) alolita: planemad: thanks!
(09:40:58 AM) pginer: I have been involved in interaction design and UI development in different contexts: academia and industry.
(09:41:50 AM) pginer: I received a PhD for my research work in the area of Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
(09:42:44 AM) pginer: and I move to a IT consulting company where we were trying to simplify interaction for several eGovernment applications.
(09:43:32 AM) pginer: Working for WikiMedia projects represents is exciting since there are lots of challenges
(09:44:14 AM) pginer: Something which could be simpler for other websites such as language selection becomes a real challange when considering more than 300 languages
(09:45:01 AM) pginer: But I hope we can hide this complexity and make users happier!
(09:45:19 AM) pginer: I'm done
(09:45:19 AM) siebrand: +1
(09:45:22 AM) siebrand: By the way, most of the work the localization team does, is open, but we try to keep redundancy to a minimum. Our work is tracked in mingle, an application for agile project management.
(09:45:30 AM) siebrand: You can find it at https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/internationalization and log in with username "guest" and password "guest".
(09:45:34 AM) siebrand: We keep records of our daily sprint meetings and our weekly team meetings at http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/l10n-team2. Older meeting notes are linked at the bottom of that etherpad.
(09:45:55 AM) siebrand: So… Questions, please.
(09:46:44 AM) siebrand: On the language selector: Our current state is in the page that I just linked to.
(09:47:13 AM) siebrand: With two weeks, we will have rough designs, and possibly also a prototype.
(09:47:19 AM) alolita: we plan to do a fair bit of indepth improvements on the ui/ux workflow for all our language extensions
(09:47:33 AM) alolita: narayam, webfonts, translate
(09:47:49 AM) alolita: as arun mentioned - we're looking at translate right now
(09:48:28 AM) alolita: and siebrand has already shared the urls for the team's projects/tasks which are on mingle
(09:48:39 AM) alolita: any questions?
(09:49:42 AM) srikanthlogic: There was also a demo of sprint 13 that was there couple of days back, link https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Localisation_team_Sprint_13_demo.pdf
(09:49:44 AM) siebrand: santhosh will now brief you on the language support teams.
(09:49:56 AM) siebrand: srikanthlogic: ah, yes, thank you for that link.
(09:50:03 AM) santhosh: Since the number of languages we need to support is large and we don't speak most of them, we really need support from native speakers. That we are atrying to achieve through Language Support team.
(09:50:22 AM) santhosh: http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Language_support_team has the current members list and brief FAQ
(09:51:03 AM) santhosh: And we need more members and active support to make the language support better
(09:51:17 AM) santhosh: If anybody see that your language not represented, ping us :)
(09:51:59 AM) alolita: if you look at the language support teams on this page - you will see that we don't have as many active folks as we would like to have
(09:52:20 AM) alolita: so i would like to put a call out for more folks to sign up
(09:53:03 AM) alolita: to be able to give us feedback on language support by the software being developed by the i18n team
(09:53:32 AM) rolphology: Is there a universal UX in progress one can visit to see how >300 language speakers will find their language? I am guessing this is in beta in a couple of formats? I have URLs above, will explore.
(09:54:04 AM) alolita: rolphology: the urls above provide a current status of work in progress :-)
(09:54:13 AM) planemad_: rolphology: you should find a couple of ideas in those pages already
(09:55:05 AM) planemad_: rolphology: because this is a problem that nobody has solved, it should be fun to experiment on it. if you have any ideas you should share
(09:56:08 AM) alolita: nikerabbit: do you have an update on the translate notifications and improvements
(09:56:54 AM) Nikerabbit: so about a month ago we started implemeting extension TranslationNotifications
(09:57:25 AM) Nikerabbit: the idea is that on projects like meta, translators can sign up using a form
(09:57:41 AM) Nikerabbit: they can choose the contact method and how often they want contacted
(09:58:28 AM) aharoni: currently these emails are sent to the translators-l mailing list and the plan is to have more structure there.
(09:59:08 AM) Nikerabbit: translation administrator can directly send these notifications from the wiki, and target the translators of specific languages
(09:59:57 AM) Nikerabbit: we have the basic funtionality working, and we are currently working on contact methods that allow you to receive notifications on your user talk page on any wikimedia wiki
(10:00:17 AM) aharoni: for people who don't want too much email, there is an option to receive no more than one notification a week or a month
(10:01:21 AM) Nikerabbit: we are planning to deploy this functionality on meta in few weeks
(10:01:43 AM) aharoni: any questions about that extension? or anything else?
(10:02:14 AM) alolita: nikerabbit: will we have a feedback period / test period for this translate functionality on meta?
(10:02:52 AM) ***planemad_ thinks if talk pages could have an auto categorize and archiving function, people could just receive notifications on their talk page.
(10:03:07 AM) alolita: any questions from our audience :-)
(10:03:41 AM) Nikerabbit: we can already provide access to testing this extension on our development sites to interested translation administrators
(10:04:36 AM) srikanthlogic: siebrand: Is the moodbar based feedback mechanism for i18n extensions planned soon ? //I vaguely remember some work was done here..
(10:06:38 AM) alolita: srikanthlogic: the feedback dashboard for i18n extensions is not planned right now; there was some thinking done around that but no concrete development
(10:07:05 AM) alolita: aharoni: can you give us an update on your presentation in kazakhstan
(10:07:09 AM) srikanthlogic: alolita: thanks!
(10:07:41 AM) siebrand: srikanthlogic: unknown. We need different functionality from what is currently offered. The ArticleFeedback functionality may be closest to what we need, but we'd like feature based feedback to end up in a queue, and would like to have it aggregated for all wikis in one location.
(10:08:53 AM) srikanthlogic: siebrand: ah ok..
(10:10:33 AM) aharoni: so, on Friday and Saturday there will be the Turkic Wikimedia Conference in Kazakhstan.
(10:11:09 AM) aharoni: And i shall be presenting there,
(10:11:30 AM) aharoni: about the importance of developing projects in people's native languages
(10:11:44 AM) alolita: srikanthlogic: as a team we are looking at various feedback mechanisms to collect comments from our users through the ui layer
(10:11:48 AM) aharoni: and about how the Foundation can help them with this - our language tools etc.
(10:11:55 AM) ***siebrand jumps up and slaps a thundering high5 with aharoni!
(10:12:23 AM) aharoni: i shall also do a quick introduction to potential MediaWiki translators and developers.
(10:13:36 AM) alolita: aharoni: <applause>
(10:13:47 AM) srikanthlogic: alolita: cool, and moodbar itself isnt i18n friendly :( 34586, 34681 made us rollback moodbar from tawiki..
(10:14:08 AM) aharoni: so i hope to see growth in Turkic languages, such as Turkish, Kazakh, Azeri, Turkmen, Uzbek, Uyghur and others.
(10:14:33 AM) aharoni: (Azeri and Uyghur also have interesting challenges with right-to-left/left-to-right text, but i digress.)
(10:15:36 AM) siebrand: Thanks aharoni.
(10:15:53 AM) siebrand: Any more questions?
(10:16:33 AM) alolita: going 1 ... 2... 3... questions?
(10:16:37 AM) Amgine: This may have been covered earlier, but what is going on with the mobile apps?
(10:16:40 AM) srikanthlogic: any updates on the Tamil font and font dev ?
(10:17:27 AM) siebrand: Amgine: Wikimedia Mobile, Wiktionary Mobile (both phone gap apps) and MobileFrontEnd (MediaWiki extension) can be localized at translatewiki.net.
(10:17:48 AM) siebrand: Amgine: any particular areas wrt to i18n/L10n you want to know about?
(10:18:30 AM) Amgine: Mostly if WTMobile has the necessary messaging set up for tw. Sounds like it does.
(10:18:36 AM) santhosh: srikanthlogic: no updates, except that the volunteer developer working on that. and I did not get any recent update from him
(10:18:42 AM) alolita: the Wikipedia Zero project is also handling its translation needs through twn
(10:18:53 AM) siebrand: Ah, yes.
(10:18:54 AM) srikanthlogic: santhosh: okay..
(10:19:08 AM) siebrand: 500 extensions supported, so bound to be in there :)
(10:19:52 AM) alolita: so we have about 11 minutes
(10:19:59 AM) alolita: any questions or suggestions
(10:20:47 AM) planemad_: i'm not sure if it was proposed before, but should we have a separate list to discuss ux issues?
(10:21:10 AM) siebrand: please no. Too many mailing lists already, i think...
(10:21:17 AM) alolita: again - we would like this session to be more interactive with lots of questions on i18n tools, improvements, ui/ux updates
(10:21:27 AM) siebrand: Wikitech-l or mediawiki-l shouldd probably do.
(10:21:28 AM) rolphology: "Warm language" methodology at the UX - culture/gender specific formulae... has this been done?
(10:21:36 AM) siebrand: As well as wiki pages, on mediawiki.org.
(10:21:47 AM) alolita: planemad: it would be good to discuss these on wikitech-l (reuse is good)
(10:22:30 AM) aharoni: rolphology: we have gender support in MediaWiki, which is getting even better now, because very soon it will be supported in JavaScript code and not just PHP code.
(10:22:30 AM) siebrand: rolphology: it's the first time I see the term. What is that?
(10:23:13 AM) aharoni: and for some languages we also have culture-dependent variants, for example German can be polite (sie) and regular (du)
(10:23:15 AM) planemad_: alolita: siebrand: ok, i was thinking a lot of people have opinions on these things, and might ending up spamming the wikitech list
(10:23:39 AM) siebrand: good content != spam.
(10:24:14 AM) planemad_: opinions on design not always good content :)
(10:24:15 AM) alolita: seconded ; it is good to have the ui/ux discussions on wikitech-l ; even if there is a potential for flame wars once in a while
(10:24:32 AM) siebrand: diff colors anyone?
(10:24:40 AM) alolita: :-)
(10:24:50 AM) aharoni: rolphology: anybody who wants more improvements in that area, such as better cultural adjustments of translations and language features, the best forum for this would be through a Language Support Team
(10:25:19 AM) aharoni: rolphology , see http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Language_support_team
(10:25:41 AM) siebrand: aharoni: I'm about to wrap up. Can you let me know when done?
(10:25:55 AM) siebrand: Okay. That's it then.
(10:26:00 AM) siebrand: A few closing remarks:
(10:26:04 AM) siebrand: We will be holding a so-called sprint demo every fortnight, on Tuesdays at 15.00 UTC.
(10:26:11 AM) siebrand: During these demos, will go in-deph on the output we have had as a team in the two weeks before, and we will outline what we will be working on in the two weeks to come.
(10:26:16 AM) alolita: that is 8am pdt
(10:26:21 AM) siebrand: Our latest sprint demo progress report is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Localisation_team_Sprint_13_demo.pdf
(10:26:29 AM) siebrand: Our next sprint demo will be on May 1, 2012 at 15.00 UTC. It's a max. 40 minute meeting, with a presentation of at most 20 minutes, and then we have a Q&A until the meeting ends or until there are no more questions.
(10:26:36 AM) srikanthlogic: wanted to check if its only me or many feel twn >>> http://st.unicode.org/cldr-apps/survey for cldr data
(10:26:41 AM) siebrand: We use WebEx, and invitations for the demos are sent to the mailing list mediawiki-i18n -> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n. Subscribe!
(10:26:51 AM) siebrand: Thanks everyone for being here.
(10:26:57 AM) rolphology: Well view UX ideas and return with more on "warm language."
(10:26:57 AM) siebrand: We're doing this again on Wednesday 16 May 2012, 16:30 UTC.