I have been thinking about this for a while, and now finally managed to write it down as a proposal. Details are on meta on the following link, below is the intro to the proposal:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia
I tried to anticipate some possible questions and provide answers on the page. Besides that, I obviously hope that Wikimania could provide a place to start this conversation. And yes, I am aware that the proposal would lead to a very restrictive solution, but imagine what good it already could achieve! And since it is not meant to replace anything, but enrich our current projects... well, read for yourself.
Cheers, Denny
Wikipedia provides knowledge in more than 200 languages. Whereas a small number of languages are fortunate enough to have a large Wikipedia, many of the language editions are far away from providing a comprehensive encyclopedia by any measure. There are several approaches towards closing this gap, mostly focusing on increasing the number of contributors to the small language editions or to improve the provision of automatic or semi-automatic translations of articles. Both are viable. In the following we present a proposal for a different approach, which is based on the idea of multilingual Wikipedia.
Imagine a small extension to the template system, where a template call like *{{F12}}* would not be expanded by a call to the template Template:F12, but rather to Template:F12/en, i.e. the template name with the selected language code of the reader of the page. A template call such as *{{F12:Q64|Q5519|Q183}}* can be expanded by Template:F12/en into *“Berlin is the capital of Germany.”* and by Template:F12/de into *“Berlin ist die Hauptstadt Deutschlands.”* (in the example, the template parameters Q5119, Q64 and Q183 refer to the Wikidata items for capital, Berlin and Germany respectively, which the templates query for the label in the respective language). Sentence by sentence could be created in order to provide for a simple article.
That wiki would consist of *content*, i.e. the article pages, possibly just a simple series of template calls, and *frames*, i.e. the templates that lexicalize the parameters of a given template call into a sentence (Note that “sentence” here should not be considered literally. It could be a table, an image, anything). The implementation of the frames can be done in normal wiki template syntax, in Lua, in a novel mechanism, or a mix of these. This would be up to the communities creating them.
Read the rest here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia