Dear Wiki*edians & especially polyglots :

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, being thankful as ever for these polylingual projects (I just won a bet with a Chilean about his home town, referencing spanish wp articles :), I would like to propose a new one (gasp!) : an all-language wiki devoted to language overviews, language proposals, interface localization (text, images, &c), and translations of core Wikimedia and MediaWiki messages. Similar proposals have been floated before, with little discussion; here is another attempt on the theme.

* Name : babel.wikimedia.org ? * Main Page : a list of languages by, say, # of native speakers/readers [1], with prominent links to other views (by language-cluster, by geographic region, by article-count, by reader popularity...), information on translators & translation, and language statistics [2]. * Content : All localizable MediaWiki strings, in 200+ languages [3]. Portals for each language, describing work being done to develop that language, with portal-content in a few core language + the lang in question. All localizable custom strings for Wikimedia projects, in those languages. Key strings and messages (such as site-wide notice templates) which are used regularly and needed in every language. Policy and discussion pages about new language creation. ** Optional content : Other translation efforts, such as global press releases, which work through a high volume of content (thousands of edits in dozens of languages) in a short period of time. ** Related project : a specific "interface-translation wiki" for the latest MediaWiki installation, which auto-updates the localizable strings in the latest MW version.[4]

Please comment or indicate support for the idea on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Babel_Wiki

[1] Not just readers; if there's no written language, audio output and input are excellent ways to transfer information... we've been doing that for eons longer than we've been passing around printed bytes

[2] % completion of interface translation; # of self-identified 'translators' in and out of the lang; full list of wikimedia projects in that lang w/origin-dates, article and active-editor counts; links to key pages on target wikis

[3] Eventually significantly more than 200. [3'] It may be useful to have one template/page per string per language, to facilitate automatic conversion from wiki to other formats; multiple views of l10n strings (e.g., 2 langs side-by-side on one page as in Special:Allmessages). ~200 languages x (200 custom strings x 5 Wikimedia Projects + 1000 standard strings) = O(500K) pages, worth its own project.

[4] These ideas could be merged; or that project (say, at language.mediawiki.org) could offer ways to pull content from the appropriate section of the Babel wiki (and more security safeguards).

++SJ