[Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] The sad story of training material to learn Farsi

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
The reason for the "deep linking" into the fa:wikibooks is because the 
text needs to be right to left. This is essential when learning 
languages like Farsi, Arab, Lori, or Hebrew. Me being the WiktionaryZ 
guy, you should be able what the solution is to make this material 
useful to people who speak English, Russian or Chinese ... Just add the 
translations to the DefinedMeaning of for English, Russian Chinese or 
whatever language.

Yes, we will need some software for that.. but given that we are slowly 
but surely getting towards the editable GEMET stuff at 
http://wiktionaryz.org the moment when this bit of functionality can be 
written is also coming closer. This would allow us to have these lessons 
just once. The "Multilingual MediaWiki" (see Meta for specs) will help 
as well..

Thanks,
    GerardM

SJ wrote:
> I don't know where to put this partly-finished text...  Three related thoughts:
> 1) One of the reasons given for speedily deleting Wikimania
> proceedings from wikibooks without discussion was that some of the
> content was not in English.  I do not think that having part of a book
> intended for English-speaking readers in a foreign language should be
> grounds for deletion.
> 2) The Farsi wikibook on the english wikibooks is just a set of links
> deep into the fa.wikibooks book:   http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Farsi 
>   Perhaps we just need Farsi training materials in more languages to
> help clarify where to put them all?  The book isn't /useless/ where it
> is now unless would-be authors can't effectively edit it in place.
> 3)  The Farsi Wikipedia just passed 10,000 articles.  Congrats  :-)
>
> SJ
>
> On 2/18/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> The timing could have been worse; Brion is busy with the integration
>> of the namespace manager. It is therefore possible to have pages in
>> the fa.wikibooks that are specific for the Dutch language and pages
>> specific for the English language. Alternatively we could have a
>> namespace for Farsi content in the nl.wikibooks. This would mean