What is the
best way to set up multilingual capabilities on an existing
wiki? I administer a wiki
that has gained some international followers, and they’d like to
translate it into their own
language to help promote it. Searching the
mediawiki.org site shows a
number of extensions,
but none really seem to suit. Ideally, I’d like to have a situation where
there is pageX_en and
pageX_de, pageX_ru, etc. Are there any recommended practices for setting
this up?
It is usually pageX/en, pageX/de, etc. actually.
But in that case, you can just do it with a template rather than extension.
Okay. So for example, at the bottom of
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LocalSettings.php#Language_of_user_interface
there is a block containing a number of languages. I am going to presume
that the translations are user provided rather than some automated process.
I did find in the documentation on that page the section for the language of
the user interface. However it does not seem to support multiple entries.
Currently I have it set to "en", I'd potentially like to add "ru",
"de", and
"it" to the list. As an added bonus, I do not have shell access to the
servers (whee). In toying with the user preferences, I can change the
interface language around to a multitude of different options. However, the
content remains in English. Also as described in
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki#Admin_choices, it does
not really define how to support additional languages, nor does the
localsettings.php file or documentation give any real clue as to how to
accomplish this.
Creating pages such as pageX/de does work, but there is nothing to specify
that this page is actually in German, other than the author writing it in
German. As an example on my wiki, I've created the page
http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Newpage/de. The contents are
Merry Christmas in both English and German. One page I read on the
mediawiki.org site seemed to say that there should be a droplist with
languages on page creation.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki page under Language
filtering shows a droplist for languages.
So after reading this information, it seems that I should create an
additional namespace for each language that I want to enable, or am I
missing something fairly obvious and simple?