On Monday 14 October 2002 12:01 pm Brion wrote:
The ideal thing to do, I think, is to make it possible to select the user interface language separately from the content language. ie, I should be able to surf the Korean entries with Esperanto menus or the English with Arabic if I'm comfortable that way.
Hm. I think this is a /very/ good idea for Metapedia which is multilingual and a place that is used by all language projects.
However, I am a bit hesitant about making it too easy for non-native speakers to contribute to languages they know little about. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but I fear we might begin to have some pretty badly written material popping-up in each language space -- or worse material submitted that isn't in the right language.
It really should be obvious to people where they are at at all times; making the German wiki look almost exactly the same as the English one doesn't help. Also, would this require more permissive charsets to be enabled on each wiki? It would be a bad idea to allow some page titles in the English Wikipedia since not allowing it helps to enforce naming conventions (why would we ever want a Madarin page title). Therefore the current en.wiki charset is fine as-is IMO.
If "where am I?" could somehow be made blatantly obvious with the interface /and/ have this be a not-so-obvious user only-set option then I would feel better about it. But then I get paranoid over the oddest things. ;-)
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)