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Welcome to theApril 2025 edition of theLanguage and internationalization newsletter by the Wikimedia FoundationWikimedia Language and Product Localization team! This newsletter provides you with quarterly updates on new feature developments, improvements in variouslanguage-related technical projects and support work, community meetings, and ideas to get involved in contributing to the projects.
TheLanguage and Product Localization team has improved theContent Translation dashboard to create a consistent experience for all contributors using mobile and desktop devices. This dashboard is now available on all Wikipedias, and the current dashboard will be removed by May 2025. The improved translation dashboard allows all logged-in users of the tool to enjoy a consistent experience regardless of their type of device. With a harmonized experience, logged-in desktop users now have access to the capabilities shown in the image. Multilingual contributors can translate new sections of articles, access topic-based article suggestions, and explore community-defined lists[1] or collections from wiki projects and campaigns using the tool[2].
8 languages were added totranslatewiki.net, including Bamum (Cameroon), Likpakpaanl (Ghana), Lampung Api (Indonesia), and Cyrillic Baltic Romani (Europe). These additions enable contributors to begin translating the interface and are key steps in the onboarding process.
Volunteer contributions included the addition of Mindong (Latin and Traditional Han scripts) toMediawiki and updates to language names for codes dso, hoc (India), and thq (Nepal). Configuration fixes were implemented, such as resolving the redirect issue for the letter ‘i’ in Karakalpak Wikipedia and splitting Mindong (cdo) into cdo-hans, cdo-hant/cdo-hani, and cdo-latn.Learn more here.
Wiki Loves Ramadan is an annual Wikimedia campaign that this year ran from February 25th to April 15th to promote cultures and traditions associated with the one-month-long Ramadan festival. The campaign focused on 32 countries, and for content creation, it spanned over 26 languages across Wikimedia platforms like Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and Wikivoyage. TheLanguage and Product Localization team worked alongside the Wiki Loves Ramadan team to add a Collection tag to theWiki Loves Ramadan 2025/List of Articles pages, which consist of articles in various categories: landmarks, cultures, and figures. With this tag, the list of articles became discoverable in the Content Translation mobile workflow.
The goal behind adding this tag was to help the team determine whether surfacing translation suggestions sourced from WikiProjects and other community-driven initiatives within theContent Translation mobile workflow would encourage more editors to discover and translate articles that address topical gaps. The hope is that this tag will help foster participation in this initiative to bridge the content gaps it has identified. This tag has also been added to several other venues such asWikimedia CEE Spring 2025 andTechnology Essential Articles.Learn more here.
As part of thelanguage onboarding experiment, five language Wikipedias were selected for graduation from theIncubator and granted full production access: Southern Ndebele (nrwiki), Iban (ibawiki), Obolo (annwiki), Tai Nüa (tddwiki), and Pannonian Rusyn (rskwiki). The Wikimedia Incubator provides a development space for new language projects before they graduate to full production wikis. However, challenges such as outdated editing tools and lengthy approval times hinder progress.
The experiment tested whether moving incubating languages directly to production wikis with modern tools would increase editing activity. Languages on the Incubator were grouped based on activity levels and randomly selected, while incorporating feedback from theWikimedia Language Committee. These five languages were moved to production wikis on 14 October 2024 after approval from the Language Committee, with a three-month experiment period ending on 12 January 2025. In November 2024, contributors from all wikis except Tai Nüa were interviewed.Learn more about the complete results here.
The goal of the analysis is to explore the topic diversity of articles created on Wikipedias from 2016 to 2024 across various dimensions, including the use of the Content Translation tool, mobile vs. desktop usage, user experience levels, regions, and the size of wikis. In addition to understanding the diversity of articles created, the goal is also to potentially inform areas of intervention under theContent Growth/Knowledge Equity (KE) bucket of the WMF annual planning. The analysis explored the following questions: the usage of mobile devices to create articles, the usage of the Content Translation tool (CX) to create articles, the topic diversity of articles created (primary topics), sub-topics by UN subcontinents, and Wikipedias with potential topic imbalance.Learn more about the complete analysis here.
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