Summary

• About 20 participants participated in the Language Technical contributions sessions at the Wikimania 2025 Hackathon preconference session. Languages represented included Luganda, Amharic, Malayalam, Dagbani, Nepali among others. With a few technical savvy volunteers to address language technical challenges, this session aimed to provide an opportunity to understanding of principles, tools, and best practices for creating multilingual software like MediaWiki that can be adapted to various regions and cultures. Session included going through task categories and examples, technical capabilities for a language to work efficiently on wiki and a collaborative technical problem solving session.Etherpad

Task Categories and Examples by @ToluAyo
Beginner-friendly tasks from actively maintained repositories, perfect for newcomers to start and get feedback easily.

• T367991: Add Iban (iba) to Names.php
• T255747: Rename special pages and namespaces in Javanese Wikis
• T378014: Date/Time formats for Serbian language are incorrect
• T328207: Change Namespace Aliases on diq.wikipedia
• T292750: Change language fallback chain for Asturian
• T375979: Namespace aliases for scn.wikipedia
• T393746: Fix ULS language data search index for Javanese
• T374886: SX: Use source/target languages from URL params everywhere
• T289105: Remove compatConfig from Vue settings
• T206307: Remove wgContentTranslationHighMTCategory configuration

Technical Capabilities for a Language to work efficiently on wiki by @jhsoby
Entailed the configuration options that most affect small languages can be split into two categories:Language-specific configuration and Wiki-specific configuration
Common configuration variables

• Most common are namespace and special page definitions
• $fallback: List of languages this language should fall back to, if translations don't exist
• $bookstoreList: Which bookstores should be linked from [[Special:BookSources]]
• $namespaceGenderAliases: When the "User" namespace should differ by gender (e.g. German "Benutzer" vs. "Benutzerin")
• $digitTransformTable: For languages not using Arabic numerals
• $digitGroupingPattern: For languages grouping numbers differently (e.g. crore/lakh:
• 12,34,56,789 vs 123,456,789)
• $separatorTransformTable: Which symbols are used in numbers (1,234.56 vs. 1 234,56)
• $dateFormats, $defaultDateFormat etc.: Date formatting
• $linkTrail: Automatically make [[abc]]def appear as if it was [[abc|abcdef]]

Perwiki settings- For individual wikis: LocalSettings.php & For Wikimedia wikis: InitialiseSettings.php (and others) in the mediawiki-config repo
Phabricator board: Wikimedia-Site-requests

Collaborative Technical Problem Solving
Entailed collectively supporting on any technical related tasks participants might need support for.

Photos

• Participants at Language Technical Contributions session at Wikimania 2025 Hackathon Preconference)
• User ToluAyod -Language Technical Contributions session at Wikimania 2025 Hackathon Preconference (Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3, photo 4),
• Jon Harald Søby at Language Technical Contributions session at Wikimania 2025 Hackathon Preconference (Photo 1)
• User Nikerabbit at Language Technical Contributions session at Wikimania 2025 Hackathon Preconference (Photo 1)
• User Nikerabbit and Jon Harald Søby at Language Technical Contributions session at Wikimania 2025 Hackathon Preconference (Photo 1)

Participant quotes and reflections

• It was good to see that there are simple contributions one can make without hard coding
• Perhaps more hands on practise e.g submitting patches

Kudos to everyone who contributed to the success of this session in one way or another (@jhsoby @ToluAyo @Nikerabbit ) and welcoming your additional reflections

I saw people trying to look for tasks relevant to their language, but had challenges. Maybe we could have done better job explaining where to find tasks. Some observations:

• They were looking at the Wikimedia-Site-requests.
• They tried to search for e.g. fiwiki, but got confused by patches and pastes. I explained how to limit search to tasks.
• I also said that many things are not found in a Phabricator, but might be a comment on their wiki or not even surfaced as people are not aware.