2010 Wikimedia design and feature change

The Wikimedia Foundation’s User Experience Team has been working with the volunteer community over the past year to introduce improvements to the user interface (see a summary of changes and the FAQ). After months of testing, the changes were rolled out to all Wikipedia languages with reasonably complete localization, and to some smaller projects, in four phases.

In this, the fifth phase, we are rolling out the changes to all remaining projects and languages, regardless of localization status. The tentative deployment date is August 25. It is of critical importance that you help us complete missing user interface translations, and report any breakage of functionality, in the days leading up to this change. We are committed to fixing all blocker bugs and will delay deployment if necessary.

Here’s how you can help:

• Become an Ambassador: Ambassadors are volunteers who coordinate the translation effort, consolidate community feedback, communicate with their community, and serve as a link between the community and the Wikimedia Foundation. Sign up on the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list, and we'll keep you in the loop about key software changes like this one, so that we can coordinate feedback. You need to be reasonably fluent in English to be an ambassador.
• Bug reporting: Please help report bugs on your project! We can’t promise to fix everything, and we appreciate your direct help to fix user-contributed scripts and gadgets, but if you report bugs, we will try our best to help fix them.
  • Enable the new user interface. Click on the "Try Beta" link at the top of the page (to the left of your username) in the project you're active on, and confirm. You can leave the beta at any time by clicking the "Leave Beta" link in the same location.
  • Please visit the bug report page to report bugs with the new features, or file a bug in Bugzilla.
• Translation: We need help completing the translation and localization of the new user interface. If you are a translator, please visit translatewiki.net to help in the interface translation effort. (If you would like to become a translator, visit the "First Steps" page on translatewiki.net to get started.) Most messages are in the "Usability Initiative" groups, but please also help to complete any missing messages from the "MediaWiki" group.

• Feedback: Please let us know what you think by providing or relaying feedback in English. We will use machine translation to survey feedback in other languages, but feedback in English has the highest chance of reaching us.