[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] uber lingua wiki

[Brion VIBBER]

> wikipedia-l at nupedia.com 10 July 2002 3:53 pm, Jan Hidders wrote: 
> 
>>Actually, I wonder if we should not do exactly the opposite: have one code 
>>base with one database that serves all wikipedias. I have the feeling that 
>>in terms of software maintenance the non-English wikipedia's are getting a 
>>very raw deal indeed; reported bugs are fixed earlier on the English 
>>wikipedia and the major software changes always happen there first. I 
>>assume this creates a feeling of being left out there in the cold.

For what it's worth, I'm one of the programmers and even *my* favored 
wiki (Esperanto) is still running the old crappy software despite 
several promises for an imminent upgrade. So don't feel bad folks, we're 
not doing it on purpose! We're just slow...

 > Having
>>one common system would in my opinion also strengthen the sense of 
>>community. 
>  
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Just want to say that I think this would be an excellent idea (if it's 
> feasible)!

The current software is intended to be able to be run from the same 
source files, with the exception of a unique wikiLocalSettings.php for 
each wiki, which specifies among other things which localization file to 
use. (Note however that it expects everything to be in one directory, so 
symbolic links for everything but the settings file pointing to a master 
directory is the simplest way to achieve this.)

Thus, only one set of files will need to be updated to get all wikis 
upgraded. But any given access to the wiki will be only in one language 
at a time...

 > It really would lead to very tight integration of the projects
> (e.g. being able to choose which language to perform searches in among other 
> things -- see below).

A while ago I whipped together a primitive meta-search page that will 
pop a search term into multiple language wikis: 
http://leuksman.com/misc/wikisearch.php

It's not too fancy, but nice if you want to check for articles on 
people, as names are usually the same...

> In addition, it would also be neat if users could then be able to set their 
> preferences so that they could choose which languages pops up in their 
> version of RecentChanges. Then Brion could watch all changes made to both the 
> Esperanto wiki and the English wiki at the same time in the same Recent 
> Changes, Anthere could do that with the French and English wiki and I could 
> watch the English, Spanish and what the hell, Latin wikis in the same 
> RecentChanges.  

I notice activity on the Latin wikipedia has dropped off a bit of late. 
Perhaps someone should advertise in alt.language.latin? ;)

> If a user wanted to, they could have a tower of Babel going on in their 
> "Inter-wiki Recent Changes". For example: Clicking on de:atom in 
> RecentChanges (or Cambios Recientes, Ostatnie zmiany, Changements 
> Récents....) would take the user to the German article with all the sidebar 
> links, the logo and hard-coded wording in German (even though the underlying 
> php code would be exactly the same -- language meta tags could be affixed to 
> each page in the database to ID the language the article was written in). The 
> fr:, de:, eo:, en: or whatever would only be part of the display of the 
> page's name in such a Inter Wiki RecentChanges and wouldn't be actually part 
> of the article's name -- just like the current inter wiki links in the php 
> software running the English wikipedia.  

Of course, this would be highly dependent on keeping all wikis on the 
same server, with all databases accessible to the same program. This may 
be considered as incentive not to fork. :)

In any case, while combining multiple languages into one view might be 
fun and occasionally useful, I think a more pressing question is that of 
linking between the language wikis.

As a number of people have pointed out, the current system (on the PHP 
software which currently only the English wiki is running) is fragile, 
and is going to become very hard to maintain: links to the article on 
the same topic in every other language must be manually inserted on each 
wiki... this is labor-intensive and prone to becoming out of sync as 
people add links on some wikis but not on others.

Proposals for improvements have included a separate database table to 
hold the links, or having each non-English wiki link just to the English 
article and having the software automagically grab the rest of the links 
from the English database. Personally I prefer a separate database 
table; people should be able to edit the link list from their own 
language environment without delving into the English wiki. In either 
case, though, the programs will all need access to the same shared link 
database, so we would need to keep things on the same server.

> I don't know if this would be easier or harder than having separate software 
> programs running the separate language wikis. But then, I could just as 
> easily split the display of my web browser Konqueror into two panes - one 
> with Recent Changes and the other with Cambios Recientes. But I'm lazy and 
> stubburn. :-)  

It wouldn't be harder per se, just different from the current setup, 
where each language is (logically) a separate server, with separate 
article and user databases.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)