Microsoft Research contributes code to MediaWiki under GPL & Apache 2.0 licenses

svn.wikimedia.org

30 points·avar··6 comments

it's not that weird like "zomg micro$oft contributes GPL code zomg zomg" ... Microsoft Research is, at its core, an academic research lab that publishes in academia. it's no more surprising than if a university contributes GPL code back to some open source project. (of course, people at MSR do often hack on proprietary projects that they can't open source, though)

basically agree... but it is at least a little more surprising considering MS is still pumping out this trash mms://msnvidweb.wmod.msecnd.net/a10026/e1/ds/us/CMG_US/CMG_Microsoft/9e361baf-9952-4d5e-9a9a-4b0bd0179d8d.wmv (if you have silverlight http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/US/details/faaf9eb8-77c...)

it is at least a little more surprising considering MS is still pumping out this trash

Microsoft is a huge company.

I doubt Office Marketing and Microsoft Research coordinated their release of a marketing video and GPL code, respectively.

What does this extension actually do? Allow for unicode to be used in mediawiki?

Unicode's already supported and widely used, so can't be that. It seems to have something to do with UI support for finding/translating text between different Wikipedia languages.

edit: Fairly comprehensive documentation (PDF): http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/W...

Looks like a fairly comprehensive tool for translating articles from other Wikipedias into a target language. Includes tools for discovering source material, as well as something called the "Collaborative Translation Framework" for crowdsourcing translations of individual sentences.

Looks nifty. Small Wikipedias will love this.

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