It is raining again—or at least it would be nice if it did. Betawiki has had some nice new progression in the spring. Aside from the general growth in translators, page requests, translation and languages, the community itself has evolved.
They have created a news letter that is sent out once a month at most. Some translators have started to suggest enhancements to the messages, for example if it is missing plural handling or bad wording that is hard to translate. Also some of our projects pages are being translated, even though the process to do so is a bit awkward.
As a platform we have adopted one new external project Word2MediaWiki plus, which converts word documents to wikitext. New extension named Babel—used by the users indicating what languages they speak and how fluently—is in development, and Betawiki has helped by providing translations and by acting as a test platform. Babel extension is developed by MinuteElectron. Let’s hope it will soon get ready for use in Wikimedia projects.
Also the first external project in Betawiki—FreeCol—got some revitalisation. I have agreed with Michael Burschik that I commit language updates from Betawiki once or twice a week. As always, faster integration cycle helps in testing the translations and messages themselves before release. Well, not everything is great and perfect yet. FreeCol development is active in the trunk branch mostly, while the translation in Betawiki are for 0.7.x branch. We support branched translations for MediaWiki and it should be possible to do so for FreeCol also. There are some jumps and hops to go trough, so it hasn’t been done yet, but should be quite easy. Also, we currently can’t generate statistics for FreeCol, but that will be fixed too.
I’m quite happy how the different work tasks are spreading out. It’s not only one man’s project anymore, and normal things go forward even if I’m not there every day. It leaves me more time to actually make it better than just run the whole project. :)