Dear Wiki*edians & especially polyglots :
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, being thankful as ever for these
polylingual projects (I just won a bet with a Chilean about his home
town, referencing spanish wp articles :), I would like to propose a
new one (gasp!) : an all-language wiki devoted to language overviews,
language proposals, interface localization (text, images, &c), and
translations of core Wikimedia and MediaWiki messages. Similar
proposals have been floated before, with little discussion; here is
another attempt on the theme.
* Name :
babel.wikimedia.org ?
* Main Page : a list of languages by, say, # of native
speakers/readers [1], with prominent links to other views (by
language-cluster, by geographic region, by article-count, by reader
popularity...), information on translators & translation, and language
statistics [2].
* Content : All localizable MediaWiki strings, in 200+ languages [3].
Portals for each language, describing work being done to develop that
language, with portal-content in a few core language + the lang in
question. All localizable custom strings for Wikimedia projects, in
those languages. Key strings and messages (such as site-wide notice
templates) which are used regularly and needed in every language.
Policy and discussion pages about new language creation.
** Optional content : Other translation efforts, such as global press
releases, which work through a high volume of content (thousands of
edits in dozens of languages) in a short period of time.
** Related project : a specific "interface-translation wiki" for the
latest MediaWiki installation, which auto-updates the localizable
strings in the latest MW version.[4]
Please comment or indicate support for the idea on meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Babel_Wiki
[1] Not just readers; if there's no written language, audio output and
input are excellent ways to transfer information... we've been doing
that for eons longer than we've been passing around printed bytes
[2] % completion of interface translation; # of self-identified
'translators' in and out of the lang; full list of wikimedia projects
in that lang w/origin-dates, article and active-editor counts; links
to key pages on target wikis
[3] Eventually significantly more than 200.
[3'] It may be useful to have one template/page per string per
language, to facilitate automatic conversion from wiki to other
formats; multiple views of l10n strings (e.g., 2 langs side-by-side on
one page as in Special:Allmessages). ~200 languages x (200 custom
strings x 5 Wikimedia Projects + 1000 standard strings) = O(500K)
pages, worth its own project.
[4] These ideas could be merged; or that project (say, at
language.mediawiki.org) could offer ways to pull content from the
appropriate section of the Babel wiki (and more security safeguards).
++SJ