[Mediawiki-l] Newbie Question on internationalization

[Gregory L. Smith]

Hello all.

 

I hope this is the proper list to pose this question.

 

I work with a non-profit group that is using MediaWiki software for
collaborative creation and distribution of documents.

 

We're trying to internationalize this effort via translation volunteers, and
have already arranged for multiple installations of MediaWiki with the
various languages.

 

Our challenge is that the English wiki (which has by far the most material,
and serves as the 'base' wiki) has hundreds of templates, etc.  There's also
many graphics, etc., that we want to share across wikis.

 

The problems:

 

1)       We'd like a way to use templates between wikis without having to
laborious cut n' paste hundreds of files.

2)       Ditto graphics

3)       Because of the nature of the material we provide, we want users to
be able to read anonymously, and to have each language default to that
language for interface-this makes using one big wiki in, say, English
problematic because users would have to become editors to change the
interface language, and we don't want "just anyone" editing the wiki pages,
a la wikipedia.

 

Could someone point us to resources or suggestions on how to efficiently
work with multiple wikis in multiple languages, while providing a central
repository for graphics files (like the Wikipedia commons) and allowing a
cross-usage of template resources where necessary?  A bonus would be
cross-linking between pages on the same topic in different language(s).

 

Or, if there are more intelligent ways to accomplish this, we'd be grateful
to hear about them.

 

I've dug around in the wikipedia/wikimedia commons files a great deal, but
haven't tracked down a good "how to" that explains how they've accomplished
these goals.

 

I appreciate any guidance or suggestions,

 

Best,

 

Greg Smith

FAIR Wiki managing editor