At Wikimedia, I am currently working on ContentTranslation tool, a machine aided translation system to help translating articles from one language to another. The tool is deployed in several wikipedias now and people are creating new articles sucessfully.
The ContentTranslation tool provides machine translation as one of the translation tool, so that editors can use it as an initial version to improve up on. We used Apertium as machine translation backend and planning to support more machine translation services soon.
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Parsing CLDR plural rules in javascript
English and many other languages have only 2 plural forms. Singular if the count is one and anything else is plural including zero.
But for some other languages, the plural forms are more than 2. Arabic, for example has 6 plural forms, sometimes referred as ‘zero’, ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘few’, ‘many’, ‘other’ forms. Integers 11-26, 111, 1011 are of ‘many’ form, while 3,4,..10 are ‘few’ form.
While preparing the interface messages for application user interfaces, grammatically correct sentences are must.
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Mediawiki moves to json based localisation file format
Mediawiki is moving from PHP array based localisation file format to json format.
This is based on the RFC: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Localisation_format
A lot of extensions were also migrated to the new localisation format, thanks to Siebrand Mazeland
The json based localization file format was first introduced in our frontend javascript i18n library https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.i18n
If you are interested in seeing some of the sample json files see https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/122787/ , claimed as “largest patch set in the history of MediaWiki”
Brackets, my favorite javascript IDE
I use Brackets for web development. I had tried several other IDEs but Brackets is my current favorite IDE. A few things I liked is listed below
It is free software licensed under the MIT License written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript Availability of large number of extensions Some extensions I use with Brackets are:
Markdown Preview for easy editing of markdown Brackets Git for git integration Themes for Brackets For Monokai Darksoda theme I use Brackets Linux UI Interactive Linter realtime JSHint/JSLint/CoffeeLint reports into brackets as you work on your code WD Minimap for SublimeText like code overview Beautify for automatic code formatting as you save using jsbeautify Beautify extension helps me a lot because most of the MediaWiki related code I write needs be as MediaWiki javascript coding convention.
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