[Wikipedia-l] Alternative language wikipedias

[Clifford Adams]

> I want to set up some alternative language wikipedias.
> ...
> One problem is going to be technical support of these languages, since if
there
> are "fancy letter" problems, I will not know much how to deal with them.
Japanese
> is pretty much _all_ "fancy letters", but I assume that Linux/Apache/Perl
will just
> magically support it?  Or will they be forced to use non-fancy ASCII urls?

    For German, French, and Spanish wikis I don't see a problem.  (In fact
there are already some semi-private UseModWiki clones for each of these
languages.)  See http://www.wikiservice.at/dse/wiki.cgi?RecentChanges for an
example of a German-language clone of UseMod which forked off as a separate
project a few months ago (at that time I wasn't very interested in translation
work).

    I am uncertain if Japanese would work well.  The FreeLink pattern could be
extended to cover just about anything, but there might be a problem with the
one reserved character value in UseModWiki.  (You can't use the character 0xB3
(decimal 179, superscript-3 in the common Windows/Latin-1 character set)
within a wiki page.  That character value is used internally as a separator in
text processing.  If the 0xB3 character is entered on a page, it will be
automatically removed.)  Removing that restriction would be a major project.
A couple pages that might be helpful for a Japanese wiki are:

* http://todo.org/cgi-bin/jp/tiki.cgi?c=h&p=RecentPages  (a Japanese wiki)
* http://twiki.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/view/Codev/KanjiCharacterSet
(Discussion of Japanese-wiki issues with TWiki)

    Finally, I'm now working on a translation interface for the wiki
interface.  All the wiki messages will go through a translation function.  The
translation messages will be in a separate file for each language (which could
be appended to the main wiki script for efficiency).  At first the translation
will be a sitewide option, but later I may add the ability to allow users to
change their language individually.

    I'm aiming to get most of the "common" interface (regular pages, the edit
page, and RecentChanges) using the translation interface by the next release
(0.92, hopefully in early April).  The release after that should be fully
translated.

            --Cliff
    (Your slightly overwhelmed UseModWiki author)