Hello,
I'm currently playing around with wikipedia to get a version with German and English entries running on my zaurus. As far as I currently understand the code, having entries from two languages would require two mysql-databases, two http-directories on the server, and cross-references between these wikis on the "en" and "de" prefix within the interwiki database table.
Is this correct or is there a way to have two languages with only one database and one copy of the mediawiki code?
BTW, http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/ still names mediawiki-20031118.tar.gz as most recent version, which got me wondering over the speed of rebuildlinks.php ;-)
Kind regards Markus
"MB" == Markus Baumeister markus@spampit.retsiemuab.de writes:
MB> Is this correct or is there a way to have two languages with MB> only one database and one copy of the mediawiki code?
Two answers to this: yes and no.
The yes answer is trivial: just add articles to a database in more than one language. For two articles that cover the same topic, you can just make links between them, like this:
Some Topic
This is the text in English. Blah blah blah.
See also: [[Schomme Topische|Ditte Artikel inn Deutsch]]
(Pardon my mockdeutsch, but you get the picture). You can even get interlanguage links to work, by mapping prefixes back onto the same wiki, like this (in table interwiki):
iw_prefix iw_url iw_local --------------------------------------------------------------- en http://www.example.com/wiki/$1 1 de http://www.example.com/wiki/$1 1
Then [[de:Schomme Topische]] will just put a link up in the "Other languages" area, pointing to the [[Schomme Topische]] page.
The problem here is that you'd get name clashes for articles that would and should have the same title in both English and German. One ugly way around it is to do some kind of fake namespacing for all articles, like "English:Dave Barry" and "Deutsch:Dave Barry", but that'd get kind of cumbersome. You might be able to get around this using tricky values of iw_url in interwiki.
As for somehow automatically making links from English pages always go to other English pages (that is, [[Dave Barry]] in English [[Miami]] always would go to the English [[Dave Barry]]), well... no.
There are some problems on the list of RFEs on SourceForge that would probly be best solved by having one database and one images dir, but I think it's going to be a while before this ever happens. It'd be a massive change and the payoff is too low.
~ESP
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