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User:Nemo bis/History

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Nostalgia

Work in progress, just collecting links for stuff to cover/steal for now. Aim: write a (verbose and complete) history of this wiki; Project:About will stay the fully official and concise one.

General overviews to steal from:

Chronological links

  • (Summer 2004 or earlier: translations for gentoo, eMule and others.)
  • 2004-09-17 first Meta translations [1]
  • First l10n bugs 2004-11 bugzilla:859 bugzilla:862
  • First MW patch 2005-01 (took two months, from w:fi:Uusi LanguageFi.php [2]) bugzilla:1403 [3] and soon after bugzilla:1752 [4] (using Nukawiki this time)
  • 2005-03-18 Nukawiki name is in use (Nike has password reset emails)
  • March 2005: this wiki is born (logo created on 19 March 2005, local install on the 9th or before)
  • Nukawiki at jadesukka.homelinux.org:8180/(golem|betawiki|mediawiki15c|wiki) [5] [6]
    • Jadesukka is the name of Nikerabbit's laptop of the time: the wiki run on it and had problems when Nikerabbit moved to a "very small dormitory" (cf. Erik's interview) due to university.
  • 2005: first users, probably recruited on IRC when not friends. For instance, dungodung (#35, first in log, 19 August) registered to test something, after meeting Nikerabbit and receiving help from him for MediaWiki/sr.wiki localisation problems on #mediawiki and #wikimedia-tech.
  • 2005-04-24: Betawiki name is in use (Nike has password reset emails)
  • 2005-05-24: Betawiki is in use, private emails about syncing LanguageSk to the wiki
  • June 2005 first commits (r9790 first l10n-related)
  • June-July 2005 started general l10n stats with Ævar and Hashar [7]
  • August 2005 first commits to update l10n by submitting patches from various sources (including Meta: MessagesXx.php pages , from very old bugs to more recent bug backlog to a constant stream of patch submissions including the first commit of 2007 at midnight/4 EEST (peak till June 2006, then military service), till August 2007 mainly.[8]
  • gangleri/לערי ריינהארט/Reinhardt [9] [10] [11] [12]
    • Nukawiki/Betawiki, Golem (rtl testwiki), FiverAlpha
    • 28 april 2005 arrives [13] [14]
    • flood of test edits [15]
    • Gangleri immediately used Nukawiki and Golem to test MediaWiki 1.5, templates, interwikis, "portability" and Yiddish interface, linking it from bugzilla reports and (ro|de|fr|en).wiki and asking interested users to join him, e.g. Patrick (user 23), Get It (25), Ggonnell (28), Parerga. [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30]
    • Some portals [31] [32] [33] [34] [35]
    • Munich [36] [37]
    • Gangleri's #wikipedia-BiDi (m:BiDi workgroup) used as IRC support channel for a while (later on #mediawiki and finally #mediawiki-i18n, saying to ask nikerabbit or robchurch).
    • 9 May 2006 "I work since few weeks wit[h] Nikerabbit to get most of the special pages fixed".[38]
    • Talks give hints about users he invited and who responded.[39] [40]
    • Chronological global edits [41] [42] (68+75 wikis with some edits not shown [43] [44]
  • May 2006: mediawiki-i18n list created with Nikerabbit owner, peak of commits; [Mediawiki-i18n] Internationalisation news 1, 2 bring new l10n stats, better plural and grammar and problem lists: bugzilla:6170, http://nike.users.idler.fi/dev/problems.txt ([45] [46] [47]). Action lists with weekly newsletter and "contest" between languages (done by Rotem Liss later) instigate a lot of translation activity in following months; scripts were also used to check patches attached to bugs.
    • Gangleri linked the Internationalisation news to many (60?) users on their talk pages (e.g. [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55]), asking them to register and translate a list of core messages divided by location.
    • More links [56] and userbox [57].
    • More August recuitment also with mass imports.[58] [59] [60] [61]
    • Betawiki had 43 users in April; in May, June and July-August it had 97, 72 and 49 new users respectively, with peaks perfectly coinciding with the delivery of the weekly news.[62] May-June peak of sysop flagging to allow translation etc.[63] [64].
  • May 2006: LanguageXx pages are deleted on Meta, because they had been used to localise MediaWiki but got "obsoleted"/inactive in 2004 after translation via MediaWiki: namespace was enabled.
  • nike.users.idler.fi: June 2006 or before (probably coinciding with the military service) – October 2007: Nukawiki in dev/ ? initially
  • Betawiki directory: July 2006 ([65] [66]) – October 2007 ([67] [68]); name mentioned since first main page revision
  • How/Who/Where: patches for bugzilla from Betawiki translations in 2005-2006 and later?
    • In 2006, there was a local hack to export Betawiki's translation, perhaps with these parameters[69]: something better than the standard format=php export on Special:AllMessage, which just listed them alphabetically.
    • Betawiki staff also often imported messages from wikipedias where they were translated locally, which needed lots of cleanup.
    • Some language portals had not only a contact person but even a responsible for the creation of patches to submit on bugzilla and then be applied. This was probably [an attempt] to reduce the work for Nikerabbit and Gangleri, but it's unclear if this worked/what was the actual process in most cases.
  • June-early July 2006: many todos from Translating:Tasks, mainly requests by Gangleri done by Nikerabbit (probably "travels" in many languages by Gangleri); later used by Siebrand in August-September 2007 helping users (previously: "I started translating on Betawiki but lost interest because I had no clue on how to proceed") and doing many commit requests.[70] [71] [72] [73]
  • 7 May and 9 June 2006: GerardM, SabineCretella and Siebrand register. Connected by interest in WiktionaryZ/OmegaWiki?[74] [75] [76]
    • I was recruited by Gangleri. I assume he recruited the others around the same time. Siebrand 09:14, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
  • 15 July 2006: [Mediawiki-i18n] Proposal for documenting use cases to show MediaWiki messages by Siebrand.[77] December: "They're now available for many (though not all) messages on Betawiki".
  • 12 August 2006: SabineCretella in OmegaT, WiktionaryZ, Betawiki ... some questions that need an answer already mentions Betawiki as a given.
  • 30 November 2006: first Translate extension commit by Nikerabbit, "Trying to make the code used in Betawiki an extension".
In 2007 the current translatewiki.net staff was complete (photo 2011)

Questions and todos

  • How did Gangleri find Nukawiki? [Niklas doesn't know.]
  • How did the others find it: see Sundar and ta.wiki, Carbidfischer, two more by email.
  • Where was the creation of mediawiki-i18n (both list and channel) discussed/decided in 2006? [Niklas doesn't remember]
  • Gangleri's October 2006–October 2007 absence[103] mentioned by SabineCretella due to personal circumstances.
  • Translate's SVN history for high level development overview.
  • Translation memory saga. Which leads to the question, what's part of TWN history? What about all the other MediaWiki/Wikimedia i18n efforts by Niklas and others (now mainly l10n team)? Probably only if they actually started from TWN and arguably made possible by TWN itself and its community knowledge: Plural, Grammar, Gender etc.? Let's be inclusive (more work!).
  • inode problem (not the same as message cache)
    • inode problem was relatively minor. It was an initial misconfiguration in the netcup.de VPS setup. Siebrand 09:12, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
  • Who were the first registered users? (May ask them what they remember.) Got a list of first 49 users including 34 before the first logged one.
  • Special:Contributions/Tester1 includes edits by different users (even anonymous), has been registered after its first edit. Database hacking?
  • SPQRobin, Jon Harald Søby, Malafaya and Gerard Meijssen. SabineCretella.
  • A photo of jadesukka! (RIP 2012)
  • Links

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