You're telling me you do L10n? Show me your commits

The reason for this blog is the following table from a corner in the Mozilla land. The name, email etc columns are uninteresting. Have a look, however, at the Role column: just one person out of 28 has not   raised his hand for translation and localization. Means that more or less everybody in the list is an active localizer?

The localization at Mozilla can mean different things:

 

Looking just at the commits for Mozilla aurora versions and into the verbatim statistics gives us a  picture, that's radically different from 27 out of 28 above. Only 8 persons out of 28 are active committers. A similar situation in Verbatim: a very lenient selection criterium  (5% and more of the work done) eliminates 17  entries from the list of 28.

One must conclude that the entry "l10n" in the role column does not necessarily mean active involvement. The best one can hope is that it means a raised hand. In the busses,bringing the pilots to their planes during the Korea war, the following rule was enforced: standing-room-only for anybody, who had yet to shoot down an enemy plane.There's been a lot of people standing around in our bus. Time to give them an opportunity, to challenge them, to take a seat.

Here's some hints on how to check the localization status for your locale:

• L10n product commits: can be deduced from http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n/mozilla-aurora/locale (for instance on  http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n/mozilla-aurora/el for the Greek community).
  
• Verbatim activity: you get the stats for Verbatim activity in a similar fashion from http:/localize.mozilla.org/locale, for instance on the page https://localize.mozilla.org/sl for Slovenian.
  
• SuMo stats:  are a little more complicated to get: you may want to have a look at the status of the site translation  first - translating support articles without localizing the site first does not make much sense. The status of the Support knowledge base and its localization can be deduced from https://support.mozilla.org/locale/localization page (here's the Croatian page).
  
• Mozilla.org: last but not least, the Mozilla web sites. You can start at the top node on locales .