On Monday 30 November 2009 15:31:48 HKairpost wrote:
Anne Wilson wrote:
As our wiki grows I become more aware that any major re-organisation needs doing now, before it becomes impossible. With that in mind I've taken the first steps in categorizing the pages. I've been looking at extensions that provide navigation aids, and see that category pages are essential to most of those. That brings up this very thorny question of language pages.
Unless something is done about it, the Welcome page could have 20 or more entries on its category page, depending on how active our translators have been. This clearly gets to the point where the page is unreadable.
I'm as well questioning multilanguage/translation support in the wiki i maintain.
For now we are using subpages (/de, /fr, /nl, etc.) as on mediawiki.org. I think it is a good solution if you want to keep one language as a reference (ie: English). That is to say that most translations are branched off english pages and that most of the new content is added in English.
This is exactly how the Translate extension works, and so far feedback from our test translators has been good. We have a few issues to iron out, but nothing that looks impossible.
I think that's close to what you are doing for KDE. If you don't want to use categories for languages it might work for you to use subpages.
I think we may well go down the path of having categories for translated pages. The list of categories will be uncomfortably long, but really that doesn't get used much. The payoff would be that a category link would only show the pages that are in the correct language. This seems the simplest solution.
Issue we face is: translators don't know which english page isn't translated yet or isn't sync anymore with the english one. Translators have to create http://wiki/pagename/es, copy english content, start translating. In other words, it doesn't favor casual translation.
If you use the Translate extension pages are marked as needing updates when something changes. However, you can't mix casual translation and the controlled translation that the extension gives. OTOH, you can translate single paragraphs at a time, which may be helpful to some translators.
It has been said to me that we should be using namespaces for languages, and that doing that would mean that in a search, for example, only pages in your system language would be returned. I've only just started reading the documentation, but I get the impression that this is not so.
If it is possible to cinfigure it that way that would for sure be interesting. But it doesn't ease going back and forth between english/other language.
No. I'm still thinking about it, but I'm not convinced that it is the right answer.
I should add that we are sandbox testing the use of the translatewiki extension and are currently considering the changes needed before implementation.
Any feedback?
Several small things that people have asked about, but the only big thing has been that one of our major translators remarked that with slow upload links, the need to upload each section separately can be frustratingly slow. This is exactly what I thought when I experimented with it, too. Against that, though, it is thought that keeping translations up to date will be a great deal easier, and after all, it's only when you have a complete new page to deal with that the upload problem is big.
Apart from http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Namespace and the pages linked from there, is there any other reading that I should be considering?
you might consider one wiki for each language + interwiki links, as wikipeadia. But it might implies that content in different languages goes in different directions. Maybe not the best for software documentation.
Yes, something similar was proposed early on, and I opposed it because I felt that it was very likely that the individual language sections would not carry the same information. Not really what we want to achieve :-)
Anne