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 the 10 highest-traffic Wikipedia languages, Wikimedia Commons, and to Wikipedias with over 80% of the interface localized.

On Sep 1, 2010, we are planning on rolling the changes out to the remaining projects, including the ones you're active on (please see the deployment page for schedule and other details), but need your help in doing so.

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. There is typically one Ambassador per project, but some projects prefer to have a team — it's up to you. If you're interested in becoming an Ambassador, subscribe to the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list so that you can receive the latest announcements from the technology team and communicate them with your community.
• 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, and translating other texts related to the roll-out.
  • To help in the interface translation effort, please visit translatewiki.net. (If you would like to become a translatewiki translator, visit the "First Steps" page to get started.) Most messages are in the "Usability Initiative" groups, but please also help to complete any missing messages from the "MediaWiki" group.
  • To translate the banners on every page, please see CentralNotice/Usability Initiative.
  • To translate the questions and answers page about Vector, please visit Usability Wiki.
• Feedback: Please let us know what you think by providing or relaying feedback in English. We will use machine translation to read feedback posted in other languages, but feedback in English has the highest chance of reaching us.