Welcome to the October 2025 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
New Scribunto Lua Library for Message Bundles
A new Lua library, mw.ext.translate.messageBundle, is now available to help developers access Message Bundles in Lua modules using the Translate extension. Learn more in the documentation: Help:Extension:Translate/Message_Bundles/Lua_reference.
This is part of the Translatable Modules project, which defines, implements, documents, and deploys a framework to make modules easier to translate and share. The goal is to enable user interface strings (messages) in Scribunto modules on multilingual wikis, such as Wikidata and Commons, to be localized as easily as messages in core MediaWiki, extensions, and translatable pages.
Initial rollout communication about this library and guidance on how to use it to access message bundles has been shared with Lua developers. See it in action in this module: Module:CapacityExchange.
Watch the translatable modules video demo.
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, 14 news projects were added, including RobloxApi, Civiform and Knowledge Graph.
In addition, 3 new languages, Dolgan, Antiguan and Barbudan Creole and Hadhrami, were added to MediaWiki after its integration into translatewiki.net, marking an important step in enhancing accessibility for diverse language speakers on Wikimedia sites. Now, individuals who speak these languages can access and contribute to Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia and Wiktionary in their native languages, fostering greater participation and contribution.
Additionally, translators using translatewiki.net can now easily prioritize and translate highly visible or high-impact messages in their native language. This work has been made possible by splitting Mediawiki core subgroups into different categories including Mediawiki core aggregates, interwiki messages, Language converter, non-translatable messages.
Volunteers also made important contributions last quarter, including: fixing namespace aliases for Sicilian Wikipedia[1], updating the language search index for Javanese[2], adding Kavalan language to Wikidata[3], improving date/time formats for Serbian[4].
Unified Content Translation Metrics Dashboard is live
The dashboard provides a range of metrics related to the use of the Content and Section Translation tools across Wikimedia projects. As a public dashboard, it can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia SUL account, no additional permissions are required: Unified CX Metrics Dashboard.
The dashboard is organized into multiple tabs, including sections on deletion statistics, machine translation services, key metrics, and more. Additional documentation and technical details about the underlying pipelines are available here: Content_translation/Public_Unified_Metrics_Dashboard.
Language track at Wikimania 2025
Participants hacking at Wikimania in Nairobi, Kenya
At Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi, sessions on language support and tools brought together participants across 20+ languages. About 70 attendees explored tools like Content Translation and Translatewiki.net, mixing new and experienced users for hands-on collaboration.
Technical sessions covered task categories, language-specific challenges, and collaborative problem-solving for languages including Luganda, Amharic, Malayalam, Dagbani, and Nepali. Smaller language discussions focused on onboarding, support, and capacity building, while the Language Support Table offered guidance on language tools and resources.
Enhanced Bot Protection Deployed on Translatewiki.net
Translatewiki.net is now safeguarded against excessive crawling through Cloudflare’s advanced bot protection, offered as part of their open source program. This protection is highly effective[5] in reducing server load, preventing slowdowns and outages, and minimizing the need for manual interventions, often required outside regular working hours. As a result, our team can now focus more on planned work and improvements.
Early Results from Engaging Native Speakers in Improving Vital Content
Visual summary of early impressions
In an effort to attract contributors to add vital content on small Wikipedias, with the hypothesis: If we invite native speakers of small wikis through a CentralNotice banner on a high-traffic Wikipedia in their region to contribute to SuggestedEdits and other Growth features, we can assess whether this approach attracts new native speakers and if they use these editing tools to improve vital content.
This experiment has yielded promising early results:The banner launched in 7 countries, 9 wikis, and 43 subnational regions. The hypothesis was supported: banners (example) received 19M impressions, 10,766 clicks, 233 new accounts, and 128 users engaging with Growth features, resulting in 55 edits by new editors. Engagement dropped at each subsequent step, which is typical for smaller wikis. Both approaches, via event registration (example) or direct-to-newcomer homepage, produced comparable results: direct access led to higher engagement rates, while indirect access led to more account creations and edits. The experiment showed that targeted outreach can attract native speakers, but it also highlighted a clear gap between initial awareness and actual engagement, pointing to the need for staged onboarding and guided next steps for new wikis. View full experiment report here.
Community meetings and events
- Sign up to attend the upcoming Language Community Meeting in November 2025.
- In case you missed the language community meeting in August, 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 had over 20 attendees, covering topics such as:
- Avro keyboard from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard.
- Wali Wikimedians, a recently onboarded language on how they are addressing knowledge gaps on the Wali Wikipedia.
Get involved
- If you are looking for technical tasks, take a look at the easy tasks that haven’t been assigned yet in various language project repositories on Wikimedia Phabricator. Also see the curated list of technical contribution tasks for language projects: T407935 .
- 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.
- Report feedback on talk pages of language tools.
Stay tuned for the next release! You can subscribe to this newsletter.
References
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