Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] Discussion about proposal for multilingual Wikinews

You know, I've actually been recently considering an idea for combining all of the Wikinews language editions into a single project. However, the code required to accomplish this in a reasonable fashion does not currently exist, and I don't think that anyone at the foundation would be willing to jump in and volunteer the significant amount of dev time that would be necessary to make such a project possible from a technical perspective... even though I can see Wikipedia benefiting immensely from the same tech. Imagine going onto a single, non-language specific Wikipedia, simply selecting your language from a list, and having every major article appear in your selected language. You switch to another language, the same article appears, with the same text, merely having been translated by users.

Translation is MUCH easier than writing a Featured Article quality article from scratch (FA articles take a surprising amount of effort and time to write),

effort that is taking place in the "separate but equal" multiple-languages version of the mediawiki software that we currently use. In such a model of Wikipedia much more emphasis would be placed on the translation of other language's articles into every language than is currently the case. (For instance, a while ago I was looking up some special type of Russian Perogie. The article I wanted doesn't exist on English Wikipedia, but it does exist on Russian Wikipedia... which was useless to me, because I don't speak Russian. Thankfully Google Translate came to the rescue... sorta.) ;-) Back to Wikinews and the issue at hand. As a Wikinews specific example of how this could eventually work: you have an article about something that happened in France, investigated by French Wikinewies, originally written in French, and then translated into Dutch, English, German, and Mandarin by other Wikinewsies. That type of coordination is currently *possible*, but it's much more difficult to manage than it would be in a better designed, multi-frontpage, auto-language selection multi-lingual site (based on your preferences for logged in users, or a per-visit dropdown language selection system (for non-logged in users)). Right now if you try to do that kind of thing you're attempting to coordinate 20 different people spread across 10 different sites; it's nigh-on impossible in practice, unfortunately. Because of the technical issues that would need to be addressed, at the present time I'd have to say that a multi-lingual version of Wikinews simply isn't practical. Combining the efforts of Wikinewies everywhere and reducing our duplication of effort via translation of locally investigated and written articles would be a great idea, but it's not something that will happen soon. That's something for the far future (10 or 15 years from now maybe), not for the immediate future. Wikinews as a whole has bigger things to worry about than that, for the moment. Maybe though, Wikipedia doesn't? Gopher65 -------------------------------------------------- From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh(a)gmail.com> Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2010 11:32 AM To: "Wikinews mailing list" <wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>; "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [Wikinews-l] Discussion about proposal for multilingual Wikinews _______________________________________________ Wikinews-l mailing list Wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l