Building blocks for the multilingual Web: Internationalization at Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites, which highlights the power of collaborative content communities online. People like you and I contribute an amazing variety of interesting content in the form of articles, photos, books and quotations in hundreds of languages across the planet.

This talk provides an in-depth coverage of open source internationalization tools specifically for reading and editing Wikipedia. Alolita will walk us through input methods and web font features being developed by the internationalization team at Wikipedia to support 300+ languages. These open source language assets are ground breaking components that are empowering billions of users to select their language, read Wikipedia articles in their own language with open source fonts available on-demand, edit Wikipedia articles using open source input methods and onscreen keymaps.

http://www.imug.org/images/wikipedia/alolita.jpgAlolita Sharma is Director of Engineering at Wikipedia. She is driving the initiative for Wikipedia to build open source tools and technologies to support hundreds of languages for Wikipedia. An engineering manager and software engineer, she has been working with open source software and has promoted open source adoption for more than a decade. She is on the board of the Open Source Initiative, advisor to Software Freedom Law Center, and a passionate advocate of open source and the open Web. She holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science and speaks internationally on internationalization, localization, open web standards, open source trends, technologies and building successful developer communities.

Schedule:

6:30-7:00 Social time with snacks
7:00-8:00 Presentation and discussion
8:00-8:30 Social time

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The Salesforce office at 123 Mission Street (one of several Salesforce offices in that area – check the address!) is in easy walking distance from the Embarcadero BART and Muni subway station, the temporary Transbay Terminal with its plethora of bus lines, the Ferry Plaza with yet more bus lines, the Ferry Terminal, the Market Street street car, the California Street cable car, and Muni bus line 1. If you still want to bring a car, note that parking in the area is generally expensive, and many places close at 8pm. Reportedly there’s attended parking at Main and Folsom, which should be open until 10pm, and unattended parking north of Market Street.