[Wikipedia-l] uber lingua wiki

[Daniel Mayer]

wikipedia-l at nupedia.com 10 July 2002 3:53 pm, Jan Hidders wrote: 
> Actually, I wonder if we should not do exactly the opposite: have one code 
> base with one database that serves all wikipedias. I have the feeling that 
> in terms of software maintenance the non-English wikipedia's are getting a 
> very raw deal indeed; reported bugs are fixed earlier on the English 
> wikipedia and the major software changes always happen there first. I 
> assume this creates a feeling of being left out there in the cold. Having 
> one common system would in my opinion also strengthen the sense of 
> community. 
 
Just want to say that I think this would be an excellent idea (if it's 
feasible)! It really would lead to very tight integration of the projects 
(e.g. being able to choose which language to perform searches in among other 
things -- see below). This would also allow, as you said, for instant 
updating of all wikis at once (assuming any new hard-coded wording is 
translated). This is how most software is developed, why not here? (although 
the install routine of most other software requires choosing ONE and only one 
language; so I am not sure if multiple languages could run at the same time 
in the same program). 
 
In addition, it would also be neat if users could then be able to set their 
preferences so that they could choose which languages pops up in their 
version of RecentChanges. Then Brion could watch all changes made to both the 
Esperanto wiki and the English wiki at the same time in the same Recent 
Changes, Anthere could do that with the French and English wiki and I could 
watch the English, Spanish and what the hell, Latin wikis in the same 
RecentChanges.  
 
If a user wanted to, they could have a tower of Babel going on in their 
"Inter-wiki Recent Changes". For example: Clicking on de:atom in 
RecentChanges (or Cambios Recientes, Ostatnie zmiany, Changements 
Récents....) would take the user to the German article with all the sidebar 
links, the logo and hard-coded wording in German (even though the underlying 
php code would be exactly the same -- language meta tags could be affixed to 
each page in the database to ID the language the article was written in). The 
fr:, de:, eo:, en: or whatever would only be part of the display of the 
page's name in such a Inter Wiki RecentChanges and wouldn't be actually part 
of the article's name -- just like the current inter wiki links in the php 
software running the English wikipedia.  
 
Of course, this feature would by default be set to only display the language 
of the wiki the user signed-in with for that session -- with no language 
codes in front of page names.  
 
I don't know if this would be easier or harder than having separate software 
programs running the separate language wikis. But then, I could just as 
easily split the display of my web browser Konqueror into two panes - one 
with Recent Changes and the other with Cambios Recientes. But I'm lazy and 
stubburn. :-)  
 
--maveric149