A component milestone of Wikidata/WiktionaryZ development is true multi-language support for page titles and content on the MediaWiki level. We have funding to pay a developer to implement it (I'll be working on versioning and object/relational mapping in the meantime), and I have written the first set of specifications for this:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki
Note that this is in no way a proposal to merge existing Wikimedia projects; in fact, MediaWiki should be fully backwards compatible and continue to act exactly as it does now in monolingual installations (there'll be a couple of new features, such as persistent UI language selection for anonymous users). However, multilanguage support should be enabled for wikis like Commons and Meta, where multiple languages are handled in a single database.
I think I've come up with a fairly clever way of dealing with the community issues of language filtering, but see for yourself. In any event, I'd much appreciate feedback on this proposal before we go ahead with the implementation, especially from Brion as the release manager. :-)
Best,
Erik
Hi Erik,
My very first post to this group (at the end of 2004??) was a question asking how to achieve this. It is a very complicated topic and one that goes to the heart of usability. I am really pleased that this work is going ahead and impressed with your specification.
My only question is what happens to first time users?
Under your proposed system users will not have to log on to change the UI. This is clearly a great improvement. But will it be possible to define a default UI language for a particular page? where no preference for UI has been selected?
At the moment the default UI is defined by the MediaWiki set-up. So someone clicking on the "Deutsch" link from www.wikipedia.org goes to "de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite" where the content is in German and the UI is automatically delivered in German too.
It would be good if this system could be preserved somehow.
Best wishes
Paul
On 1/17/06, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
A component milestone of Wikidata/WiktionaryZ development is true multi-language support for page titles and content on the MediaWiki level. We have funding to pay a developer to implement it (I'll be working on versioning and object/relational mapping in the meantime), and I have written the first set of specifications for this:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki
Note that this is in no way a proposal to merge existing Wikimedia projects; in fact, MediaWiki should be fully backwards compatible and continue to act exactly as it does now in monolingual installations (there'll be a couple of new features, such as persistent UI language selection for anonymous users). However, multilanguage support should be enabled for wikis like Commons and Meta, where multiple languages are handled in a single database.
I think I've come up with a fairly clever way of dealing with the community issues of language filtering, but see for yourself. In any event, I'd much appreciate feedback on this proposal before we go ahead with the implementation, especially from Brion as the release manager. :-)
Best,
Erik _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
-- Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica
admin Yellowikis:
Under your proposed system users will not have to log on to change the UI. This is clearly a great improvement. But will it be possible to define a default UI language for a particular page? where no preference for UI has been selected?
That is the idea. To quote the proposal:
<< When no user interface language is set, the UI language should be identical to the content language, that is, when viewing pages in English, the UI language should be English; in German, the UI language should be German, and so on. This ensures that each language community can customize the interface messages according to their needs, and emulates the current behavior of multilingual Wikimedia projects with split databases.
Best,
Erik
Sorry Erik - I must have missed that.
Any idea when it will be ready for testing?
Paul
On 1/18/06, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
admin Yellowikis:
Under your proposed system users will not have to log on to change the UI. This is clearly a great improvement. But will it be possible to define a default UI language for a particular page? where no preference for UI has been selected?
That is the idea. To quote the proposal:
<< When no user interface language is set, the UI language should be identical to the content language, that is, when viewing pages in English, the UI language should be English; in German, the UI language should be German, and so on. This ensures that each language community can customize the interface messages according to their needs, and emulates the current behavior of multilingual Wikimedia projects with split databases.
Best,
Erik _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
-- Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica
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