Google Summer of Code!

My last post was two months ago, but I waited for a decision on my Google Summer of Code application before making a new blog post.

... and I was accepted :-) Awesome!
I will be posting updates on this page.

However, MediaWiki switched from SVN to Git and Gerrit, which makes developing a lot more difficult...

Also, MediaWiki 1.20wmf1 was deployed to Wikimedia wikis. For Incubator, this also brought Special:SearchWiki, which you can use to search for a wiki by selecting the project and entering a language name/code. If recognised, this will redirect you to the wiki if it exists and if it doesn't, it will redirect to the test wiki on Incubator.

In late March, several new wikis were created. The Lezgian Wikipedia, which I had fully imported within an hour after it's creation :P, the Belarusian and Gujarati Wikisource and the Slovenian Wikiversity, all three were imported by MF-Warburg.

The Translate extension was already enabled on Incubator back in February, but since then we updated more pages to that system, so again, anyone is encouraged to help with translating :)

Apparently I wasn't involved with much other wiki stuff except for regular Wikipedia editing (plus, in real life, I went skiing for a week without any access to the internet! :D).

Regards,
SPQRobin

Restarting this blog - news for February

It has been a long time since I made a blog post, and this is the first one that will be available through the Wikimedia Planet.

Since May last year, I've been voluntarily posting monthly reports of the Wikimedia language committee. Sometimes it included other relevant news, but I would like to extend my reporting to other things I do in the Wikimedia world, so that's why I'm restarting this blog. I, or occasionally a mysterious guest blogger, will probably write posts about news related to the LangCom, language support, Incubator, … 

I think this format of monthly updates is something that I am more likely to keep doing, rather than posts about a specific topic.

The following is what was up in February:

• On 1 February, three wikis were created: vep.wikipedia.org, pnb.wiktionary.org and mr.wikisource.org
• 1.19 deployment of course, which brings localized magic words and LanguageConverter to test wikis to Incubator
• I've added a WebFont for the Lontara script, which will be enabled tomorrow on the Buginese Wikipedia.
• For the Burmese language, which did already have WebFonts support, I submitted a bug to enable it on the Burmese Wikipedia.
• In the committee, I've proposed the approval for the Slovenian Wikiversity, currently an active part of the BetaWikiversity.
• Updated and improved some documentation on Meta related to requesting new wikis: merged several templates into one (hopefully easy to use) template.
• The Translate extension has been enabled on Incubator, which improves the translation process of our documentation there. If you enjoy translating, your help is very welcome :-)
• I'll probably participate in GsoC (I've been thinking about e.g. global preferences).
• Applied for a Wikimania scholarschip, and maybe I'll submit a presentation.
• Among other things, I'm working on Special:SearchWiki for Incubator, which should make it easier to find a wiki in your language.

Regards,

Robin (SPQRobin)

Restart blog

About two years ago, I wrote some posts, but I deleted some of them because I didn't write anymore here. Now I will maybe restart this blog and write some posts now and then.

Blog

Recently I was considering to really start with this blog...
All good names are already taken, so now the URL of my blog is like my wiki name.

If I really start, I will write about subjects that interest me.
So for example about preserving languages: it is important for endangered languages to have a Wikipedia, therefore I am active in the process to create Wikimedia wikis.

I'll see what I'll write...