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?