Language and Internationalization/Newsletters/10 – Diff

Language and Internationalization/Newsletters/10 – Diff
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Welcome to the
January 2026
edition of the
Language and internationalization
newsletter by the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Language and Product Localization
team
! This newsletter provides you with quarterly updates on new feature developments, improvements in various
language-related technical projects
and support work, community meetings, and ideas to get involved in contributing to the projects.
Subscribe to the newsletter
Key highlights
Language Support for New and Existing Projects and Languages
translatewiki.net
is a platform for gathering translations of interface messages for Wikimedia and other open-source projects. This quarter,
17 new projects
, including
Lingua Libre
Broomstick
and
Lexica
, and 2 languages, Shughni
[1]
and Hyam
[2]
, were added.
In addition, 3 new languages from the African continent, Bole
[3]
, Jju
[4]
and Bono
[5]
, primarily spoken in Ghana and Nigeria and totaling over 2 million native speakers, were added to MediaWiki. This lays the groundwork for communities to contribute to future Wikimedia projects in their native languages.
Volunteers also made important contributions, including adding Hokkien Hàn-lô writing script
[6]
and changing numeral symbols in Levantine Arabic’s interface from Eastern Arabic to Western Arabic numerals.
[7]
Update on the CapX Translat-a-thon
The
Capacity Exchange (CapX)
platform hosted a Wikimedia Translat-a-thon in partnership with the
Language Diversity Hub
, bringing together volunteers from around the world to collaboratively translate and localize the CapX tool, documentation, and capacity directory. A key highlight was the Capacity Exchange translation tool, built specifically for this event to make it easier to translate capacities into many languages. Over the course of two weeks, 43 contributors worked together to produce 5,559 translations across 48 languages.
[8]
12 languages selected for the Language Diversity Hub mentoring program
The
Language Diversity Hub
has selected 12 languages (4 with an existing Wikipedia and 8 currently in Incubator) for its 2025-2026 mentorship program, aimed at helping advance their Wikimedia projects. The program will offer personalized mentorship tailored to each community’s needs, technical support around project infrastructure, workflows, and content development, and peer-learning opportunities to connect communities across regions, languages, and stages of growth.
[9]
Universal Language Selector rewrite plans
Universal Language Selector (ULS)
is a MediaWiki extension. Its main features include language selection, input methods, web fonts, language search, and other language-related settings. The current codebase is quite old and suffers from performance issues.
The goal of the rewrite is to include ULS in MediaWiki core, so it can become the default language selector across MediaWiki, including mobile skins, and provide a more consistent user experience. The rewrite will use the modern Codex design system and extend ULS to offer clearer entry points for other tools or for modifying its behavior. Overall, these changes aim to address existing performance and accessibility issues.
[10]
[11]
Community meetings and events
Sign up to attend the upcoming
Language Community Meeting
in February 2026.
In case you missed the language community meeting in November 2025, you can catch up by watching the
video recording and reading the notes
. This meeting was co-organized by the Language and Product Localization team and the Language Diversity Hub and featured over 20 attendees, including contributors from the
Wikitongues project
and
Fante Wikimedia Community
, who joined as session presenters.
The
ESEAP conference
(for the East, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific region) will take place in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on 15–17 May 2026. The focus of this conference will be on language diversity, Indigenous knowledge, minority languages, and technical support.
Get involved
If you are looking for technical tasks, take a look at the easy tasks related to internationalization, localization and translation of MediaWiki on
Wikimedia Phabricator
If you are looking for tools to edit and translate articles and interface messages, you can use
Content translation
and
Special:Translate
on
Translatewiki.net
. These tools make it easier to work with content in different languages. Please share any feedback on the talk pages of these language tools.
Stay tuned for the next release! You can
subscribe to this newsletter
References
phab:T409846
phab:T405473
phab:T409708
phab:T408150
phab:T406198
phab:T392749
phab:T382781
phab:T395997
Wikimedia Language and Product Localization/ULS Rewrite
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