On 14/07/07, Sean Whitton <sean(a)silentflame.com> wrote: Your impression is incorrect; MediaWiki at present contains no support for content in multiple languages in the same wiki. This is being worked on in the Multilingual MediaWiki project, although it is at present unclear how much of this can/will be incorporated into the core software. We operate different web sites using separate databases and some clever configuration selection, which I believe Tim Starling has documented elsewhere; check Meta for "wiki farm" and similar search phrases. However, these do all point to different sets of content altogether. There are some limited features in the software which allow it to recognise special link forms, e.g. [[en:Foo]], where "en" is a valid interwiki link, and also recognised as a language link; this causes the "in other languages" panel on the left side of a rendered page to be updated, however, this is just a link, and the individual MediaWiki installations aren't "aware" of each other as such. Rob Church

Hi, some of the things that I've learned while working on Mediawiki I18N: * I18N is not just translating messages. There's more: * Different numbers are used by different languages * In some languages, you have to take care of grammatical cases, e.g. genitive, which is hard to notice if you don't speak those languages. * Some languages don't use italics. Don't hardcode <i> to emphasize something. * Some languages have prefixes to words. In English, there's the 's' suffix to make a noun plural, other languages use prefixes for this, or they combine the article and the noun. Links have to work different on those wikis. * Words are not always separated by whitespace. Some languages have one letter per word. Links should not extend to following characters like they do in English (e.g. [[house]]s) * Unicode support is a well of never ending joy * Writing direction switches don't work as you'd expect, esp. when users on RTL wikis use LTR usernames. E.g. when you have a number, a username and a timestamp and don't take care, the timestamp might by right or left of the username, depending on the username (Remember: "Arabic" digits (123..) are LTR). * Some letters look the same, but have different codepoints. A (Latin Capital Letter a) and A (Greek Capital Letter alpha). This allows the creation of user names and pages which resemble already existing pages/users. Nice for vandals. * There are different ways to encode the same character. Diaecritical letters (like the German Umlauts) have their own codepoint, but can also be combined using a base letter and a diaecritical sign. Lot's of fun if you upload images from a Mac and try to insert them in an article from a Windows/Linux computer. Don't forget to normalize all user input. * PHP's support for Unicode string manipulation is poor. Many of the above mentioned problems forced us to write custom extensions for PHP. MediaWiki started with internationalization in mind, but the authors of it were only speaking western languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Esperanto) and many of the problems mentioned above required code changes. There are still open issues. E.g., in piedmontese, there's a conflict between certain language constructs requiring multiple ticks (') and the wiki syntax for bold/italics. So yes, MediaWiki is quite good when it comes to internationalization, but it's still far from perfect. Regards, jens