Developer Day done
It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m in my hotel room getting ready to head for the airport shortly. Thought I would jot down some thoughts about yesterday’s excellent Developer Day before I leave.
We had a rousing discussion about MDC localization, and I have a few things to work on when I get home, including setting up more information about how to do localization, as well as who’s working on which localization, in the wiki itself.
We also brainstormed a number of interesting ideas about ways to improve localization, which I’ll get into in more detail when I have a little more time.
One idea I’m particularly excited about is the idea of setting up a template that could be placed on translated pages that would cause a notice to appear if the English version of an article has changed more recently than the translation.
The folks that work on our localizations are all very enthusiastic people with a passion for the project, and it was a thrill to meet them face-to-face.
I skipped dinner last night due to my cold and the early hour of my departure today. I’ll grab something to eat once I’m at the airport.
June 24th, 2007 at 3:37 PM
Yes, it was a very interesting weekend.
I have to write down a list with ideas to share with other localizers, it’s in my todo list for this week ;)
June 24th, 2007 at 4:37 PM
I had hoped you would be there at the dinner to talk a little further, but as far as I can tell the other teams have mostly the same ideas anyway :)
The only thing I haven’t heard about is supporting the MediaWiki API on MDC. It would probably be useful to develop external tools (extensions, remote scripts, …).
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API
I’ll see what we can add to Nukeador’s list too.
June 24th, 2007 at 9:43 PM
we have the minutes from MDC chat written down: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dtmwnwg_2p6bgpw
We can start shaping a document with them on the Wiki and add more
June 25th, 2007 at 6:59 PM
I was so tired after the day’s meetings, and wasn’t feeling well, so I decided to skip dinner on Saturday night. I should be back to work tomorrow and will post up my notes as well. It was great to meet you all, and I look forward to working on some of this stuff together!
Benoit, let me look at that MediaWiki API stuff and get back to you.
June 26th, 2007 at 4:27 PM
Benoit — what sort of tools can you think of that we might do using the MediaWiki API? I’m looking at it and nothing comes immediately to mind.
June 26th, 2007 at 4:53 PM
I’m not sure yet, I’d hoped to be able to somewhat automate our tracking of the most viewed pages in need of translation.
For example, there is a call to get all language links for a given page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API#langlinks_.2F_ll_.28done.29
If we use it with a list of English page titles (i.e. the most viewed pages), we could quickly find out which ones are _not_ available in a particular language.
Of course, we could do the same thing by trying to parse the HTML pages. This API seems a faster and more reliable way to do it though.