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)