Michael Monaghan wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking at trying to use WikiBooks at the enterprise level.
I'd like to be able to use WikiBooks in a multilingual doc development
environment.
However a major drawback I see is that, for example, in WikiBooks the entire
body contents of a page are stored in one database field. And there's no
obvious way to link translations together.
The main body of the page is all stored in one database field. Users can
enter HTML, wiki shorthand, regular text etc - there's no enforced structure
- an XML DTD etc - to the content. This again causes portability problems to
other apps etc.
There are similar problems in Wiktionary - but they are being addressed by
the "Ultimate Wiktionary" project.
Has anyone got any thoughts/solutions for this for WikiBooks?
thanks,
-mm
I'm glad to see a little bit of activity on this mailing list, so I want
to thank you for coming here to discuss this issue.
Some of what you are suggesting is a part of the "WikiData" extensions
to MediaWiki that have been proposed earlier, and is a part of the
larger "Ultimate Wiktionary" project. Basically, having the ability to
directly access and set up database fields that can be edited in a
dynamic fashion. There are a number of things that would benefit from
such a project.
One othing thing I've thought about is to try and come up with some
tools to help with the "annotated texts" that would be of a similar sort
of project. In mideval times it was common to have not only
annotations, but annotations about the annotations.... sometimes as much
as four or five levels deep. In the case of the Bible, it is strongly
suspected that some portions of those annotations actually ended up as a
part of the text itself due to copy errors.
As far as including translations with a text, but keeping them seperate
from editing, you have the ability to do transclusions through template
tags, which can provide at least some way to accomplish what you are
suggesting. The only problem at the moment is that you can't do
transclusions across different wiki language editions. Links between
different languages, however, are already present in MediaWiki to at
least assist in the translation if the linked modules are about the same
text. I'm trying to help find a solution to the problem you present
with current tools rather than with trying to push the MediaWiki team
for any more features. There are many features that are currently
"turned off" with MediaWiki software at the moment merely because of the
crushing impact of all of the Wikimedia users. If we can get the server
bandwidth issues fixed, perhaps some of these features will be turned
back on in the future.
--
Robert Scott Horning