Hi,

Le Sunday 18 July 2004 04:30, Daniel Mayer a écrit :

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Similar conversion of Wikibooks should be a fairly simple thing, I'm now just waiting for community approval. We can't put subdomains under wikisource.org because the domain name doesn't point to the right place. It's owned by Mav and points to a redirect server, redirecting to quote.wikipedia.org.

Yes, I think Wikibooks in French is much wanted.

Please don't do that Tim since a French Wikibooks already exists at http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page:Fran%C3%A7ais .

I feel that many people want to work on French Wikibooks, but don't because of the English interface. So there are just a few pages which would be easy to move. And there is still the problem of name conflicts.

We just need the ability to switch the interface language via preferences.

This has been talked about for months but nothing happened. And I didn't see any short term plan for that.

-- mav

Yann

Le Sunday 18 July 2004 04:30, Daniel Mayer a écrit :

...

...

Similar conversion of Wikibooks should be a fairly simple thing, I'm now just waiting for community approval. We can't put subdomains under wikisource.org because the domain name doesn't point to the right place. It's owned by Mav and points to a redirect server, redirecting to quote.wikipedia.org.

Yes, I think Wikibooks in French is much wanted.

Please don't do that Tim since a French Wikibooks already exists at http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page:Fran%C3%A7ais .

We just need the ability to switch the interface language via preferences.

-- mav

Just FYI, after a quick poll in the Bistro, 7 more people voted in favor of a subdomain http://fr.wikibooks.org, and none against it.

Please could you create it? Thanks, Yann

Timwi wrote:

Tim Starling wrote:

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Wikiquote now has specific-language subdomains. Instead of creating wikis for all 150 languages, I made a system where wikis are only created when they're wanted.

How can the "wiki doesn't exist" page be edited?

Two files:

/home/wikipedia/common/php-new/missing.php and /home/wikipedia/htdocs/index.html

The first is for subdomains which are configured for a shared document root, and includes the PHP necessary to check if the subdomain corresponds to an approved language, and to add the language to a queue. At the moment this means *.wikiquote.org and *.wiktionary.org. The second is for all other non-existent domains. The text is based on the meta main page.

-- Tim Starling

MikyT wrote:

Hi! I'm the first user of the italian wikiquote. I see that there are a few errors in the translation of the user interface? Can I fix them? Who can do this?

There are instructions on changing the interface at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_namespace.

However, to edit these messages, you need administrator access (see http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Amministratori for details). There are no admins on the Italian Wikiquote yet, but users of that wiki can apply for this at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions.

Angela.

Daniel Mayer wrote:

Wikibooks is internally multi-lingual so there is no need for sub-domains. The foundation owns and controls wikisource.org and I no longer have access to it to change settings. That project is *also* internally multi-lingual and thus there is no need for subdomains (they would also be very repetitive since the same source docs will need to be used in many different languages).

What we need is the ability to switch user interface language in the same wiki.

Could we carry out this discussion on the wiki instead? See:

http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Staff_lounge#Multiple_subdomains.3F

-- Tim Starling

Daniel-

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How about a setup like this: de.wikimedia.org en.wikimedia.org fr.wikimedia.org

Absolutely not! We need ONE place where we can all come together. That place is currently meta. I'm therefore very strongly opposed to balkanizing the only common place we all can edit. The interface issues need to be fixed and Meta should be made into a truly multilingual wiki.

Having multiple languages in one wiki doesn't help people to come together. In fact, in my experience, it does the exact opposite. Parcipation on Meta by people from languages like Chinese or Japanese is minimal. I'm afraid Meta is perceived as an extension of the English language Wikipedia.

You can't eliminate the language barrier by throwing all languages into one big pot. That only means that the most popular common one - English - will dominate and small pockets of non-English discussions will form. This is what has happened on the multilingual mailing lists and it is what will continue to happen on Meta if we stay on the current path.

The reality is that because of the language barrier, there *are* different communities. Because of national barriers, there *are* different Wikimedia interests. And there's no reason why an interesting global policy discussion shouldn't be started by people who speak no English whatsoever, and then be translated into the main languages if there is a vote.

While I would prefer it if all languages of a project were handled with a single database and codebase, this requires quite substantial changes to the current code, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And if it happens, we can port all the existing wikis over to that new system. But I think we should strive for a consistent approach.

Regards,

Erik

I would prefer Meta to be kept as a single site. If the content is kept on one site and someone chooses to write in Hindi, for example, then other people will at least see that comment and someone will be able to translate it into English or their own language. If it was on a different wiki, translation is far less likely to occur, so the discussion would involve only the few people active on the Hindi Wikipedia.

Having 150 different Metas for each language might sound a nice idea in theory, but Meta has far too low traffic already. Splitting it up is going to decrease participation even more. What would be the point of a Meta in Italian if no one is participating there and things happening on the other language Metas are not being disseminated to the other ones? With 150 sites, who is going to take Wikimedia-wide news to each separate language? If the other languages are still supposed to watch the English one to know what is going on, what is the benefit of splitting them?

Erik wrote:

Let's take the "Stewards" discussion and vote as an example. The whole discussion was mostly English as was the voting page. If we used subdomains, we could have made it a requirement that the page be translated into the main languages before we vote. We could have aggregated the votes from the different language Wikimedias so that each community could express their preferences in their language. We could have translated important arguments from the discussion in realtime (in the form of localized "pro" and "cons" lists, for example).

Why would you need subdomains to do that? You can force such requirements whether Meta is on one site or not. In fact, having it all on one site makes it easier as you can see when pages have been translated.

Look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation/New_upload_form for example. If the page had been only on the German Meta, how would people who speak other languages know to translate it? At least this way you can see which links are still red and which have been translated.

This is a lot better than having a single page with the occasional piece of untranslated French or Japanese between a couple of participants. In that case, the main part of the page is English - excluding those who don't speak it - and some parts of the discussion are not - excluding those who don't speak that language. It's a lose-lose situation.

If it's on one site, it is far more likely not to remain untranslated. If a discussion on Meta is in Esperanto, it's far more likely to be translated into the languages other users want to translate it into that it would be if it was hidden away on the Esperanto Meta.

This requires some way to deal with namespace conflicts - e.g. wikimedia.org/en/Merchandising vs. wikimedia.org/de/Merchandising (the current Merchandising page on Meta is actually German), and we would have to set up automatic redirects for subdomain access.

We already have a way of dealing with title conflicts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation

My comments above are based on what is available with the current software. Obviously, if anyone wants to code a way to avoid needing to check dozens of different recent changes to know what is going on, that would be great, but until then, they should not be split just in the hope that one day the software will make it easy to check all of them.

-- Angela

Daniel Mayer wrote:

--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:

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This may be a good time to rethink our approach to Meta. Currently there is just one big, messy Meta-Wiki, with neither particularly clear policies (although my CPOV draft attempts to remedy this to some extent) nor interlanguage links. Help texts are spread across the "MediaWiki User's Guide" and the Help: namespace, with non-English texts in the English language Help: space.

That was true a few weeks ago, but things have changed: * Patrick is moving the complete User's guide into the help namespace * there is a clear category system on http://meta.wikimedia.org/Meta:Categories which permits to find the important pages * more cleanup ongoing

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On the other hand, as Mav keeps pointing out, we have no real community editable Wikimedia presence.

How about a setup like this: de.wikimedia.org en.wikimedia.org fr.wikimedia.org

Absolutely not! We need ONE place where we can all come together. That place is currently meta. I'm therefore very strongly opposed to balkanizing the only common place we all can edit. The interface issues need to be fixed and Meta should be made into a truly multilingual wiki.

I agree with mav. In the german chapter we thought about setting up an own wiki for the chapter but in the end we decided to use meta to avoid balkanization and to facilitate cooperation.

I'd like to have a setting to switch the interface to german to make german meta-contributors feel more at home, but there's no need for separate wikis and zillion of translation pages. My thoughts: * our representation for visitors (the WMF website) should be multilingual * the most important pages on meta should be translated (we don't have the capacities to translate everything) * we should accept that we need a working language (english) for wikimedia * pages in other languages should contain english abstracts * pages in english can have abstracts in other languages

In my opinion, it's an illusion that participation in wikimedia affairs is possible without a basic knowledge of English. People should have the possibility to inform themselves about the goings-on, but it makes no sense f.e. to translate the german preparations for the Linuxtag Lörrach into spanish. On the other hand, the spanish people should be able to see that there are preparations done and ask the germans for experiences and tipps for a congress in Spain. If everything was done in separate wikis, they would probably not realize it.

greetings, elian

Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

I agree with mav. In the german chapter we thought about setting up an own wiki for the chapter but in the end we decided to use meta to avoid balkanization and to facilitate cooperation.

I think I already said it, but I will repeat then :-) I was really glad you move the chapter things to meta.

I'd like to have a setting to switch the interface to german to make german meta-contributors feel more at home, but there's no need for separate wikis and zillion of translation pages. My thoughts:

• our representation for visitors (the WMF website) should be multilingual
• the most important pages on meta should be translated (we don't have

the capacities to translate everything)

• we should accept that we need a working language (english) for wikimedia
• pages in other languages should contain english abstracts
• pages in english can have abstracts in other languages

In my opinion, it's an illusion that participation in wikimedia affairs is possible without a basic knowledge of English. People should have the possibility to inform themselves about the goings-on, but it makes no sense f.e. to translate the german preparations for the Linuxtag Lörrach into spanish. On the other hand, the spanish people should be able to see that there are preparations done and ask the germans for experiences and tipps for a congress in Spain. If everything was done in separate wikis, they would probably not realize it.

greetings, elia n

You are totally correct on this.

Erik Moeller wrote:

In any case, I think there should be no separate Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Foundation wiki - they should be the same thing.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Erik

I think they should be separated.

The reason of wikimediafoundation site is to present a unified front to outside. It should be clean, with no dispute, and it should be consistent with the Foundation frame of mind. It should also contain a whole bunch of data, which should not be modified too easily by anyone (like financial issues).

On the other hand, meta is about brainstorming. It not only can, but should contain many povs. It should be a boiling soup, with many languages; something rather anarchic. A place where we can make mistakes, where we organise ourselves. Where everyone can edit freely.

This makes them necessarily separated. They do not have the same editors (foundation should be a subset of meta), they do not have the same goal at all.

If we put them together in the same pot * this will be confusing for outsiders, as they will launch on possibly highly disorganised pages * there will be no certainty that what is written is what the foundation supports

Now, I remember very well your CPOV proposition, which aimed at strongly limiting access to meta, by requesting that people identify themselves by real names to have the right for their edits to be claimed trustworthy, when the edits of non real people were labelled "untrusted or non representative of a so-called community point of view" by default.

There is no such thing as a community point of view, especially at the international level. There are a certain number of points on which we all agree. Aside from that, there are a collection of pov, some totally incompatible, and many compatible.

This CPOV proposition will have to happen over my dead body :-) I trust people for what they are and what they do, not for their real name. And a place where ideas are thrown in the pot is good. We sometimes need the stupid ideas to find the best ones. Labelling ideas not CPOV when they do not suit your own opinion is bad. Voting all the time to decide which are CPOV and which are not is equally bad. This may clarify some points, but also mark them in stone. I am sorry Erik, but this is really not an issue on which I think we will ever meet agreement.