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Welcome to the July 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.
Key highlights
Language Support for New and Existing Projects and Languages
translatewiki.net is a platform for gathering translations of interface messages for Wikipedia and its sister projects. This quarter, 7 new projects, including a MediaWiki Extension Recent Activity and Wikivoyage Listing Editor, were added to the platform. In addition, Lakota (lkt), an endangered Native American language with fewer than 10,000 speakers, was added to MediaWiki [1]. Two volunteers also made improvements to language support, including updates to magic word configuration for Karakalpak [2] and localization of MediaWiki language messages for Pashto [3].
Wikimedia Foundation renewed its Associate membership with the Unicode Consortium earlier this year
As part of this membership, a coordination group has been set up to help bridge community needs with the Consortium. If you have come across any language- or script-related issues in your work on Wikimedia projects that could benefit from Unicode’s involvement, it would be great to hear about them. You can learn more about ongoing topic explorations here. The group has followed up on requests related to adding a diacritic mark for Vietnamese orthography and adding SignWriting.
Wikipedia Starter Kit Dashboard MVP: Community testing and feedback
As part of the MVP rollout, the Starter Kit’s Main Page customization feature was tested with three communities, Tyap, Jju, and Fula, which also used the feature to update the Main Pages on their wikis. Feedback from the communities was largely positive, particularly around the ease of setup and the reduced time required to configure a homepage. Contributors noted that tasks which previously took days or weeks could now be completed in about an hour using the Starter Kit. Communities especially appreciated that much of the HTML and CSS was already in place, making it easier for contributors without strong technical backgrounds to configure their Main Pages. Suggested improvements have been summarized at T420075.
The Starter Kit Dashboard MVP also neared completion, covering six essential tasks [4], an Activity & Growth component [5], and a Community & Collaboration component [6]. The MVP was presented at the May 29th Language Community Meeting, where User: Kambai Akau also shared their experience using the Starter Kit to customize the Main Pages for the Jju and Tyap language communities.
Feedback was gathered on the Dashboard MVP from selected administrators and communities. Their input helped identify which parts of the Starter Kit are most useful, how well the current guided tasks work, and what additional support would be valuable for wiki onboarding and development. Suggested improvements have been summarized at T428121.
Modernizing the Content Language Selector
The Universal Language Selector (ULS) has been part of MediaWiki since 2013, but its underlying technology had become increasingly difficult to maintain, with long-standing issues around accessibility, performance, and visual consistency that could not be addressed without a rebuild. Rather than rewriting the entire extension at once, the team rescoped the project to focus on the most visible and most-used component: the content language selector that lets readers and editors switch between language versions of a Wikipedia page.
The updated selector is built with Codex, the Wikimedia design system, and brings several improvements: faster and more reliable loading, dark mode support, improved keyboard and screen reader navigation, and the ability to pin preferred languages for quicker access. Visual and behavioral inconsistencies across different surfaces have also been reduced.
This work is now complete and the new selector is deployed. Other parts of ULS, including web fonts and input methods, are not in scope and continue to function as before. The team will continue working on selected improvements left out of the initial project. If you encounter unexpected behavior or have feedback, you can leave a note on the ULS discussion page.
Article Guidance: First version built, experiment results, and next steps
This quarter the team launched the first version of Article Guidance, a new feature designed to help junior editors create articles that are more likely to survive community review. The current workflow appears before the Visual Editor opens, guiding editors through topic selection and surfacing community-defined guidance for the most common article types.
A controlled A/B experiment launched on Simple English, French and Turkish Wikipedias in May. The final experiment results will be shared on the project page by the end of August.
The team is now focused on a second version that brings guidance both before and inside the Visual Editor, co-existing with current Visual Editor features such as Suggestion mode and EditCheck (tone, paste, and reference checks). The goal is to have a combined experience ready to experiment with in October.
Community meetings and events
- Sign up to attend the upcoming Language Community Meeting in August 2026.
- In case you missed the language community meeting in May 2026, 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 Dagbanli Dictionary, OpenSpeaks and Starter Kit projects, who joined as session presenters.
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.
