Wikimedia blog 
The creator of the wiki, Ward Cunningham, wanted to make it fast and easy to edit web pages. Cunningham named his software after a Hawaiian word for “quick.” That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation is happy to report that editing Wikipedia is now twice as quick. Over the last six months we deployed a new technology that speeds up MediaWiki, Wikipedia’s underlying PHP-based code. HipHop Virtual Machine, or HHVM, reduces […]
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Wikimedia Technical Operations joins the Phabricator party
0 Comments BY Quim Gil ON December 19th, 2014
The Wikimedia Foundation Technical Operations team (“Ops”) are moving their processes to phabricator.wikimedia.org, thus joining the merge of multiple developer and project management tools into a single Wikimedia technical collaboration platform. This week, we migrated 5,986 tickets from RT to Phabricator, and now most requests to Ops can be initiated…
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Introducing lead images to Wikipedia’s Android beta app
3 Comments BY Dan Garry ON December 17th, 2014
Here in the Mobile Apps Team at the Wikimedia Foundation, we’re working to make it easier for the world to experience knowledge on mobile. More and more, users around the world are accessing Wikipedia on the go through their mobile devices, and it’s important that they can easily and quickly…
READ MOREAn experiment in self-organization at the Wikimedia Foundation
1 Comment BY Kristen Lans ON December 10th, 2014
Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation’s mobile web engineering team underwent a rapid change, more than doubling the number of engineers on the team within a period of four weeks. While this change was eagerly anticipated, the team size increase had unanticipated impacts on our team process and communication. It quickly became…
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Content Translation: Announcing Version 3
1 Comment BY Runa Bhattacharjee ON December 10th, 2014
Exciting new features are now available in the third version of the Content Translation tool. Development of the new version was recently completed and the newly added features can be used in Wikimedia’s beta environment. To use it, you first need to enable the Content Translation beta-feature in the wiki,…
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Welcome to Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform
9 Comments BY Quim Gil ON November 24th, 2014
Wikimedia launches a space for collaboration open to all contributors: phabricator.wikimedia.org. Primarily devoted to software development, this platform also welcomes non-technical projects. Wikimedia Phabricator has been available since September for early adopters. Its prime time starts this week, after having incorporated 73,681 reports migrated from Bugzilla, the bug management tool…
READ MOREApertium and Wikimedia: A collaboration that powers the Content Translation tool
0 Comments BY Runa Bhattacharjee and Kartik Mistry ON November 14th, 2014
Many readers of this blog know about the Content Translation initiative. This project, developed by the Language Engineering team of the Wikimedia Foundation, brings together machine translation and rich text editing to provide a quick method to create Wikipedia articles by translating them from another language. Content Translation uses Apertium…
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Wikimedia supports the Lyon Declaration and Access to Knowledge
1 Comment BY Stephen LaPorte and Yana Welinder ON November 10th, 2014
The Wikimedia Foundation is proud to join the Lyon Declaration on Access to Information and Development which calls for United Nations member states to provide all people the ability to access and share knowledge. After all, this speaks to the ambition of the Wikimedia movement: sharing the sum of all human knowledge to all people around the world. […]
READ MOREUpdates in MediaWiki internationalization reflect changes from CLDR
1 Comment BY Runa Bhattacharjee ON November 4th, 2014
CLDR, the Common Locale Data Repository project from the Unicode Consortium, provides translated locale-specific information like language names, country names, currency, date/time etc. that can be used in various applications. This library, used across several platforms, is particularly useful in maintaining parity of locale information in internationalized applications. In MediaWiki,…
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Announcing the second version of the Content Translation tool
0 Comments BY Runa Bhattacharjee ON November 3rd, 2014
A few months back, the Language Engineering team of the Wikimedia Foundation announced the availability of the first version of the Content Translation tool, with machine translation support from Spanish to Catalan. The response from the Catalan Wikipedia editors was overwhelming and nearly 200 articles have already been created using…
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