[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] uber lingua wiki

For what it's worth, I'm one of the programmers and even *my* favored wiki (Esperanto) is still running the old crappy software despite several promises for an imminent upgrade. So don't feel bad folks, we're not doing it on purpose! We're just slow... Daniel Mayer wrote: The current software is intended to be able to be run from the same source files, with the exception of a unique wikiLocalSettings.php for each wiki, which specifies among other things which localization file to use. (Note however that it expects everything to be in one directory, so symbolic links for everything but the settings file pointing to a master directory is the simplest way to achieve this.) Thus, only one set of files will need to be updated to get all wikis upgraded. But any given access to the wiki will be only in one language at a time... A while ago I whipped together a primitive meta-search page that will pop a search term into multiple language wikis: http://leuksman.com/misc/wikisearch.php It's not too fancy, but nice if you want to check for articles on people, as names are usually the same... I notice activity on the Latin wikipedia has dropped off a bit of late. Perhaps someone should advertise in alt.language.latin? ;) Of course, this would be highly dependent on keeping all wikis on the same server, with all databases accessible to the same program. This may be considered as incentive not to fork. :) In any case, while combining multiple languages into one view might be fun and occasionally useful, I think a more pressing question is that of linking between the language wikis. As a number of people have pointed out, the current system (on the PHP software which currently only the English wiki is running) is fragile, and is going to become very hard to maintain: links to the article on the same topic in every other language must be manually inserted on each wiki... this is labor-intensive and prone to becoming out of sync as people add links on some wikis but not on others. Proposals for improvements have included a separate database table to hold the links, or having each non-English wiki link just to the English article and having the software automagically grab the rest of the links from the English database. Personally I prefer a separate database table; people should be able to edit the link list from their own language environment without delving into the English wiki. In either case, though, the programs will all need access to the same shared link database, so we would need to keep things on the same server. It wouldn't be harder per se, just different from the current setup, where each language is (logically) a separate server, with separate article and user databases. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)