Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Rally update

The translatewiki.net localisation rally has ended. There are 36 people who can claim their part of the 1000 EURO prize we have been donated for this purpose by the Dutch chapter.


The big winners are the people who use MediaWiki; their readers and editors. Localisations have been done in Romanian, Greek, Arabic, Indonesian,  Lithuanian, Finnish, Italian, Slovenian, Simplified Chinese, Croatian, Occitan, Brazilian Portuguese, Tarandine, Catalan, Danish, Hebrew, Breton, Estonian, Macedonian, Thai, Mongolian, Afrikaans, Swedish, Polish, Nepali, Hungarian, Khmer, Cebuano, and Esperanto. All of these languages gained at least 500 or 1000 new localised messages.

A big thank you to all the participants. I hope they will appreciate the importance of their work and continue to support their language by localising MediaWiki.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2 comments:

ZaDiak said...

I would like to mention that Greek because of this rally improved its statistics a lot. The MediaWiki extensions went from 40% to 65%. The Extensions used by Wikimedia were completed. So did the MediaWiki core (the messages there were only a few). I hope that rallies will continue to take place. Thanks a lot to all the translatewiki staff.

Siebrand Mazeland said...

Thank you for the compliments, and congratulations on helping the Greek language community improve their MediaWiki experience.

We - as translatewiki.net staff - too hope that we can continue having Translation Rallys. However, they cost 1,000 Euro every time and there is no organisation behind translatewiki.net. A propos: out Google AdSense has brought us less than 100 Euro in over a year.

Having this large an incentive too often will lead to strategic planning of contributions from translations, in my firm opinion; this is something bad, not something good. We/I see a Translation Rally as a sausage we keep in front of those that need a little pull, and hope they will see the results in their favourite MediaWiki environment - either a Wikipedia, a corporate wiki, or whereever, and keep returning on a regular basis. Also if there is no other incentive than the satisfaction of having helped.

So, *if* there is going to be another Translation Rally, and in that case, when, is something I will never announce. Please do what you can and are able to, and try to grow a consistent and active group of translators for your language.

As I said on the last Rally's talk page: 13 language already had so many translations made - i.e. have such a high localisation level - that getting a cut from the incentive simply was not possible, because almost all messages had already been translated. It is my fiece hope that this number will rise and rise. Cheers!