If you haven’t visited our developer wiki recently, you’ll be surprised at how much it’s grown since we launched it in April. We now have over 1,200 pages of tutorial guides, FAQs, white papers, wiki books and package pages. And if English is not your first language, you might be interested to know that we recently made it a lot easier for you to use our developer wiki in your native language.

What has changed?

You can now set your preferred wiki language using the main page of your site user profile – which will show all fixed wiki text in your chosen language. Access your user profile by clicking your user name in the top right of any developer.symbian.org web page.

Unfortunately we can only display an article in your chosen language if someone has translated it. To make it easy to find translations, another recent change is that every wiki page now has a sidebar containing links to all the translations of the current page.  For the most popular languages on the site (currently English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish) we even display red-links to translation pages if they don’t exist – making it a one-click operation to start a new translation. You may manually create a translation page for any other language by creating a sub-page of the English page and naming it using the correct language code – e.g. My_Wiki_Page/it to create an Italian translation.

The final change that I’d like to mention is that we now automatically add a category to every page in a particular language. You can select the category from here to see a list of all articles in your preferred language.

There is a more comprehensive discussion of all these changes in the Symbian Foundation Language Policy.

How you can help

We’ve provided the infrastructure, and have some translated pages already, but we hope that others in the community will join us to create further translations and new topics in their native languages.

If you’re thinking about doing some translation, we recommend you start by translating the Main Page, Help page (and other help articles), and the Language Policy.  After that, it’s up to you. Personally I think it’s most important to help new developers – so translating anything in the Quick Start category would be particularly valuable.

In addition to articles, some of the fixed wiki text may also need translation.  You can help as we describe here.

Who did what?

As the project lead, I worked with Product Management (Jessie Hu and Dennis Lee) to define the high level requirements, and with Maki Nagata from Symbian Japan who checked that our ideas would work in Japanese. Many thanks go to our IS team who helped to nail down the precise implementation detail.  The implementation was mostly done by Nick Boultbee, our resident MediaWiki and web guru (a term I do not use lightly!).

Where do we go from here?

Our multilingual support is now significantly better than on most other MediaWikis. However, if you have other ideas on what else you’d like to see please let us know (comment here or contact the technical communications team). We’re always looking for suggestions for other MediaWiki plugins that might be useful, and would appreciate any ideas or recommendations too!

And if you want to catch me in person to talk about the developer site, internationalization or plugins, I’ll be at SEE 2009 later this month, and at the San Francisco Qt Developer Day in early November.