Hi,
Thanks for your effort, Erik - but I cannot imagine how to get to a multilingual MediaWiki documentation soon. Not only MediaWiki but also Wikipedia (at least the German one) lacks a clean documentation. How do you want to seperate both?
You wrote:
That means you can now edit Hilfe:Inhalt or Aide:Aide like the English users have been editing Help:Contents. Why is that important? Because it allows us to easily export all the help files in one language, and import them into another wiki.
Import how? Do you want to make the Help:-Namespace on local Wikipedia read-only and dynamically mirror the localised pages from meta? What does happen to the (indeed messy) documentation at each Wikipedia?
Once the pages have stabilized, we should clean out the Help: namespaces of all Wikimedia projects and import the meta pages instead. We can then upgrade them regularly (even daily) and automatically on all wikis.
Seems like a hen and egg problem.
I just doubt you get Wikipedia users writing documentation at meta, because:
1. There is no single log-in (and with this a single watchlist!) 2. You better document the Wikipedia you are working on. This includes documenting MediaWiki but there is no sense to seperate for a Wikipedian
I tried to integrate MediaWiki and Wikipedia documentation at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hilfe:Inhalt but I better do it within the German Wikipedia in the Help-Namespace.
Once the pages have stabilized, we should clean out the meta:Hilfe namespaces and import the de:Hilfe pages instead. We can then upgrade them regularly (even daily) and automatically on all wikis.
Greetings, Jakob