After the tour around Europe and Asia, it became very clear that even Labs projects (perhaps especially Labs projects) need to enable a global community by providing better on-ramps to participation in more languages. Everywhere I went, I heard frustration that all of our documentation (when it exists) is written only in English. That makes it hard for contributors to get up to speed on a project, and for potential contributors to find out about a project. Luckily, everywhere I went people volunteered to translate what they could, if we had the infrastructure to support them.

With a head nod to Lipsey and Lancaster: “Wikis are the third best solution to any problem.”

MDC (Mozilla Developer Center) has done a great job showing the power of wikis to invite world-wide contributions. To make this a possibility for Ubiquity projects I’ve been looking into the API for Mediawiki. It allows such neat tricks as pulling out structured content in JSON, which makes it easy to build a pretty front-end for a Ubiquity site that uses wiki.mozilla.org as a back-end.

Awesome Statistics

While looking into the API, I discovered a whole bunch of neat statistics about wiki.mozilla.org. A couple things to call out:

The Ubiquity User Tutorial is the 10th most visited site on the Mozilla Wiki with 1/3 of a million reads. In 9th place is Prism, which is another Labs project (this one originated by Mark Finkle). In 11th place is Mobile, which is run by Jay Sullivan formerly of Labs and uses a UI that was informed by Labs. Just squeaking in under the top fifty, in 47th place is the Ubiquity Author Tutorial, which is a bit shy of 100,000 reads. Then, in the most active pages section, the Ubiquity Commands in the Wild comes in 2nd, with 588 revisions. Wow!

It’s great to see Labs generating so much interest! It’s also interesting that the authorship tutorial was read only one third as meany times as the user tutorial. It shows just how generative the community we work in is.

RT @azaaza Documentation Localization (and Ubiquity in the Top 10) | Follow @azaaza on Twitter | All blog posts