[Mediawiki-l] multi language mediawiki site

[Rowan Collins]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 22:22:58 +0100, solo turn <soloturn at gmail.com> wrote:
> hi,
> 
> i searched the web on how to set up mediawiki multilanguage site. but
> the only thing i could find was "use a dedicated database scheme per
> language".
> 
> what would be the best strategy to have the mediawiki installed once,
> and use it for en.site.com and fr.site.com?

The way the Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc) do it is
[I think, approximately] by installing a seperate database for each
one, and a seperate LocalSettings.php, but then including a
CommonSettings.php (for things which should be the same for all
languages) and one central copy of the actual MediaWiki PHP files. I'm
not sure if they use symlinks or PHP includes or what for this, but
that's the basic idea. Then, of course, you set up the interwiki
tables in each database to let you do inter-language links like
[[en:Page title]] / [[fr:Titre de page]]

 I think there's various bits and pieces about this on
http://meta.wikimedia.org, but I don't know of a single page that
gives a complete guide I'm afraid.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]