Hi, I've searched rather far and wide for an example configuration of a single topic wiki with a number of languages, but haven't found anything other than a few disparate suggestions of how to go about implementing it using the existing version of mediawiki. The general requirements are: - Like wikipedia, language in indicated in the domain name (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/, etc). - The user database is shared among all language wikis, but articles are not. Images/media are shared. - The code is not duplicated in multiple folders. Symbolic linking is okay. I have a partially-working setup I've hacked together myself that uses symbolic links, some mod_rewrite magic, multiple LocalSettings.php files, and a separate database for each language with the user tables (user, user_groups, user_newtalk, watchlist) federated to a single database. However, I'm interested in seeing how other people have done it. Would anyone care to share their configuration, or point to a online reference I may have missed? Thanks and Happy New Year, Garth
Hello Garth,
I've searched rather far and wide for an example configuration of a single topic wiki with a number of languages, but haven't found anything other than a few disparate suggestions of how to go about implementing it using the existing version of mediawiki. The general requirements are:
- Like wikipedia, language in indicated in the domain name (e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/, etc).
- The user database is shared among all language wikis, but articles
are not. Images/media are shared.
- The code is not duplicated in multiple folders. Symbolic linking is okay.
Depending on the size of your wiki, the other option is using sub-pages for each language as described here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Languages
for example:
http://www.myWiki.org/wiki/Main http://www.myWiki.org/wiki/Main/DE http://www.myWiki.org/wiki/Main/FR http://www.myWiki.org/wiki/Main/ES etc.
which gives you a language bar at the bottom of your screen.
Mark W.
Hi, I've searched rather far and wide for an example configuration of a single topic wiki with a number of languages, but haven't found anything other than a few disparate suggestions of how to go about implementing it using the existing version of mediawiki. The general requirements are:
- Like wikipedia, language in indicated in the domain name (e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/, etc).
- The user database is shared among all language wikis, but articles
are not. Images/media are shared.
- The code is not duplicated in multiple folders. Symbolic linking is
okay. I have a partially-working setup I've hacked together myself that uses symbolic links, some mod_rewrite magic, multiple LocalSettings.php files, and a separate database for each language with the user tables (user, user_groups, user_newtalk, watchlist) federated to a single database. However, I'm interested in seeing how other people have done it. Would anyone care to share their configuration, or point to a online reference I may have missed? Thanks and Happy New Year, Garth
Hi Garth,
I have no experience with multilingual wikis using MediaWiki, but I have created a small proof-of-concept prototype of a multilingual wiki engine. You can view a demo of it here:
http://lizzy.iit.nrc.ca/LizzyHelpNew/uploads/demo_of_multilingual_LizzyWiki_...
And the design is described in this research paper:
http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/publications/nrc-48736_e.html
If you are interested in this kind of issues, I would encourage you to join the wiki-translation community which I started with Aphaia (the Wikipedia translation coordinator) and Marc Laporte (leader for the TikiWiki project).
In particular, you might be interested in the Cross-Lingual Wiki Engine project which is hosted there:
http://www.wiki-translation.com/tiki-index.php?page=Cross+Lingual+Wiki+Engin...
This project was started in December, and it's trying to figure out what tools and processes are needed to support translation of content that is produced in a wiki way. We are using TikiWiki as our reference platform, but we hope that the kinds of processes and features we develop for it will be a useful source of inspiration for other engines as well. We would certainly love to have people from the MediaWiki community participate.
Alain Désilets
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org