[Mediawiki-l] A problem of language page control

[HKairpost]

Anne Wilson wrote:
> As our wiki grows I become more aware that any major re-organisation needs 
> doing now, before it becomes impossible.  With that in mind I've taken the 
> first steps in categorizing the pages.  I've been looking at extensions that 
> provide navigation aids, and see that category pages are essential to most of 
> those.  That brings up this very thorny question of language pages.
>
> Unless something is done about it, the Welcome page could have 20 or more 
> entries on its category page, depending on how active our translators have 
> been.  This clearly gets to the point where the page is unreadable.
>   

I'm as well questioning multilanguage/translation support in the wiki i 
maintain.

For now we are using subpages (/de, /fr, /nl, etc.) as on mediawiki.org. 
I think it is a good solution if you want to keep one language as a 
reference (ie: English). That is to say that most translations are 
branched off english pages and that most of the new content is added in 
English.

I think that's close to what you are doing for KDE. If you don't want to 
use categories for languages it might work for you to use subpages.

Issue we face is: translators don't know which english page isn't 
translated yet or isn't sync anymore with the english one. Translators 
have to create http://wiki/pagename/es, copy english content, start 
translating. In other words, it doesn't favor casual translation.

> It has been said to me that we should be using namespaces for languages, and 
> that doing that would mean that in a search, for example, only pages in your 
> system language would be returned.  I've only just started reading the 
> documentation, but I get the impression that this is not so.
>   

If it is possible to cinfigure it that way that would for sure be 
interesting. But it doesn't ease going back and forth between 
english/other language.

> I should add that we are sandbox testing the use of the translatewiki 
> extension and are currently considering the changes needed before 
> implementation.
>   

Any feedback?

> Apart from http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Namespace and the pages linked 
> from there, is there any other reading that I should be considering?
>   

you might consider one wiki for each language + interwiki links, as 
wikipeadia. But it might implies that content in different languages 
goes in different directions. Maybe not the best for software documentation.

hka.