Thursday, March 20, 2008

Supporting relases; this is what we do it for

Don Osborn wrote on the Afrophone mailing list about the use of MediaWiki by ICANN for its Internationalized Domain Names evaluation. In the IDN evaluation, people are asked to test their application; eg browsers or mail clients with domain names that contain characters other then the Latin script.

Don wrote because among two new languages Amharic was added. Don wrote that they use a wiki for this and indeed they use MediaWiki.. :) . I had a look at the version they are using, they are on 1.10 while the latest release is 1.11 and release candidate 1.12.0rc1 is out.

For Amharic this difference is big. In Betawiki we have had a lot of activity for Amharic; 89.79% of all the MediaWiki messages and 4.69% of the messages used in the extensions used by the WMF are now localised. The most used messages were only finished on the 17th of Januari..

Other languages that ICANN does not support for its script in their IDN evaluation yet are Georgian and Bengali. Both are languages with a lot of recent localisations.

The application by ICANN of MediaWiki for its IDN evaluation demonstrates that our localisation effort is relevant outside the WMF as well. We are happy that with the 1.12 release there will be a continued localisation effort. The details on how later localisations will be made available are not known to me yet, but I have been told that there will not be an issue.
Thanks,
GerardM

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