International Wikis (2010 edition)

Pierre · 2010-04-15 13:05:28

So, there were some discussion about how to handle internationalization in the past. Some things have changed and we have a lot more experience. So I think it's worth to review the situation and our plans.

We finally have a simple but well working interwiki implementation; the same that is sued for wikipedia. (see http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17580) There is no automation or checking so far; but usage is quite straight forward. I would propose the following:

* An english article links to several international articles. E.g.: [[de:Pacman]], [[pl:Pacman]]
(note that the title of the target wiki has to be used here)
* The localized wiki article will link to the english site only ([[en:Pacman]])
* Non-English articles on wiki.archlinux.org have to be merged/moved to their international wikis if that ist available.
Don't forget to empty the article (including all category references and i18n templates) here and add a redirect like
#REDIRECT [[de:Pacman]] (note: has to be in first line)
* To move complete articles export it including its history and import it again on the target wiki. (you'll need admin
permission on the target wiki)

This is quite some work, but should be doable with the help of the community.

I know that this also implies that the "separate wiki for each language" approach is the preferred one. This also would make some of the work that was put into the i18n template stuff obsolete as this is provided by the wiki software itself now. (it will generate a "other languages" menu automatically etc.)

I hope you guys don't mind that much and see the benefits; especially in long term. I don't want to force it for every language though but suggest to join this wagon. If needed I could provide help for international communities to setup their local wiki. In fact it would be best if we all use the same setup: http://projects.archlinux.org/vhosts/wi … x.org.git/

This would also make administration of the english wiki easier and improves the search a lot which finds a lot of foreign language duplicates atm.

ashunter · 2010-04-16 03:02:30

I have some different opinions about non-english wikis,especially the TITLES.
Current titles form as "Title in English(Language)",this is ridiculous.
Don't forget non-english wikis are for people that do NOT know english!
With such a title,ok,they know it's writen in "Language",but what is it about?The key part of the title is in english!And when people open a category and want to find the arctile they need,what do you suggest?Open each link and have a look?
This would make administration of the english wiki easier,BUT it's NOT user-friendly!
I'd suggest all titles form as "Title in Language(Title in English)",the "Language" part behind Article Title is simply not necessary,for english wikis amdins they just need to know what the Article Title is in english,and for users of course they know what language it's if the Article Title is writen in their own language.

Pierre · 2010-04-16 03:22:54

You most likely misunderstood me. With my approach titles will be in a native language only without any postfix. Here is an example:

We have the articles about fonts here: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fonts This will have a link added to e.g. https://wiki.archlinux.de/title/Schriftarten by adding [[de:Schriftarten]] to it; the german article on the other hand will have a link to [[en:Fonts]].

I hope to made it clearer this way.

pointone · 2010-04-18 16:27:07

I welcome this change. It is the easiest way to provide a complete internationalized experience; articles, system messages, help content, and all. I am concerned about the return to a system that requires manual maintenance of interlanguage links on each page, but this task is simplified provided that localized articles link back only to the English version.

I would like to contact the maintainers of the handful of separate wikis we are aware of to draw their attention to this discussion. Hopefully, we can coordinate a community effort to merge/move content for existing wikis as a first step.

Pierre · 2010-04-22 09:23:44

We'll see how much work it is to mange those links. But it should be possible if every local community manages their own language links.

I wonder if we should think about a l10n mailing list again. It seems the number of international communities has grown significantly since the last attempt.

keplerspeed · 2010-07-02 08:52:43

Has there been further discussion about this in other places? I would assume that the use of the i18n template will continue for the time being, since the majority of pages remain on wiki.archlinux.org.

When will the wiki software be capable of auto generating the menu for the [[de:Fonts]] links? When should this start to be used, and if so, will it be used alongside the i18n template until all pages are merged to their own wikis?

Would it be possible to implement a template similar to i18n, that will automatically pull article links from international wikis? This would remove this issue of manual maintainence of international links.

pointone · 2010-07-04 00:15:46

The majority of the de pages have been migrated, thanks to Pierre. This new system should be used as soon as other administrators of int'l wikis take notice, import out-of-sync/date content, and update pages here to redirect. Until this happens, both the i18n template and the interwiki solution will coexist. (Though there has been talk of configuring "dummy" interwiki entries to replace the i18n template.)

Based on my experience developing the i18n template, it may be possible to automatically generate interwiki links using the ParserFunctions extension.

stefanwilkens · 2010-10-06 20:45:52

Is it me or will the success of this highly rely on the continued existence of our internationalized sub-communities. (what happens if archlinux.{de,it,pl,us,....} go down.) Can the search function be modified to only search articles in the default language, set by the user?

I realize you've chosen a path, just coining a thought in case it hadn't been coined before.

dolby · 2010-12-14 21:29:59

stefanwilkens wrote:

Can the search function be modified to only search articles in the default language, set by the user?

I would like to know if this is possible too.

karol · 2010-12-14 21:33:28

dolby wrote:

stefanwilkens wrote:
Can the search function be modified to only search articles in the default language, set by the user?
I would like to know if this is possible too.

I don't think it's possible. archdocumentalist from AUR tried to solve this but there's no simple way atm.

Jonas Ferry · 2011-02-23 22:16:31

Wouldn't one solution be to add custom namespaces for the languages currently without an external wiki?

You then setup the interwiki links to point to each new namespace and move the pages of a language there. Interwiki links are added to the English pages pointing to translated pages, and they get an interwiki link pointing back to the English article in the Main namespace. The i18n template can be dropped as pages are moved. If a language gets an external wiki in the future, pages can be moved there and the the interwiki configuration updated without changing the interwiki links of the English pages.

It's great that information is available in multiple languages, but pages keep getting added to the wiki according to the i18n template instructions. When you search for "laptop", you don't want the first result to be Czech, the third to be the article in English and the sixth and seventh results to be the same page in Italian and Russian.

I can help move pages and add interwiki links if this sounds like a good idea.

Pierre · 2011-02-24 00:22:04

Well, its all about man power. If there were a few people who would organize moving non-english articles to local wikis and clean up the chaos we have atm that would be awesome. Techincally we are done. Of course this needs to be organized with local communites which makes this task even more complicates.

That way we could also find out if there are local communities without their own wiki and why. I am sure whatever the issues are here they can be solved. That's way cleaner and future proof than trying to have more than one language in one wiki.

Jonas Ferry · 2011-02-24 09:18:50

We can start by moving the Swedish articles.

I guess the long-term solution would be separate local wikis per language hosted by the same people hosting the main wiki. Three drawbacks with local wikis are that you would need to register separate accounts to edit different wikis, it’s harder to handle spam if the localized wikis don’t have users patrolling them regularly and you don’t move user accounts. I don’t think those drawbacks should stop us from cleaning up the main namespace, but maybe there are other solutions apart from hosting multiple wikis I haven’t considered.

Is it possible to get a Swedish wiki running at a sub-domain of archlinux.org with interwiki links set up to and from the English wiki? Preferably updating the MediaWiki software would not be handled on a per-wiki basis because rarely used languages would soon use older versions. All wikis should be upgraded at the same time and use the same configuration.

In the Swedish pages links pointing to the English articles would break after a move. The solution I prefer is using redirect pages. That way, if you create a Swedish pacman pag,e you don’t have to modify any links in other pages.

The work flow would be:

Set up localized wiki.
Update interwiki settings.
Leave a message on the talk page of a couple of contributors of the localized pages.
Move page (using transwiki importing).
If needed clean up links by adding redirects back to the English main wiki.
Update interwiki links to and from the English wiki.
Repeat step 3-6 for all pages.
(Optional) Translate page titles to localized versions.
Repeat step 1-8 for each language.

Does that sound about right? I can set up a wiki page for coordination if this is the way to go.

karol · 2011-02-24 17:08:10

@ Jonas Ferry
You can have a look how the German wiki works: https://wiki.archlinux.de/title/Pacman

Larsson · 2011-02-24 19:21:08

Since I've started translating the articles to Swedish it would be good to get it right from the start. My plan at the moment is to translate all the front page articles. I have no problem doing all the translation, but I need someone to set up the local wiki and point me in the right direction. (I can be contacted at Larsson@jabber.org),

cedeel · 2011-02-26 02:00:24

A wiki has been set up on http://wiki.archlinux.dk/

I am in the process of copying all the translations over. I'd appreciate any help getting the interlanguage links working.

Jonas Ferry · 2011-02-26 11:38:37

I’d like to reiterate the idea of using custom namespaces for languages other than English. I think it's a lot easier to implement than hosting a wiki family or waiting for local contributors to set up their own wikis.

Benefits are:

Improved searches (default searches in English, users can select to search in specific languages)
Improved Recent changes page (can be limited to specific namespaces/language)
No hosting or sub domains needed for local wikis
Interwiki links set up pointing to namespaces behave like off-wiki interwiki links
No need for multiple user accounts if you want to edit both English and localized articles
Links from localized pages to English pages still work after the move
You don’t need to know the language to move articles, as no meaning is added to the pages, just organization

This would increase the number of namespaces, but that is a lot better than the current solution with all languages being mixed.

Do wiki Admins or Maintainers have access to MediaWiki maintenance scripts? There’s MoveBatch that takes a file of “existing name|new name” lines. If that can be used to move pages to a new namespace I can set up such a file for the Swedish articles and perform the Interwiki linking after they have been moved.

pointone · 2011-02-28 19:44:58

One of the primary benefits of hosting separate international wikis is having the entire interface (menus, system messages, etc.) in one's native tongue rather than just content. In this respect, using custom namespaces would only be a temporary step towards a fully internationalized solution.

tuxce · 2011-03-06 13:07:26

Hi, I'm from archlinux.fr, we've just migrated our wiki from dokuwiki to mediawiki so we can have coherent interwiki links.
(http://wiki.archlinux.fr)

Is there some guide on how to update interwiki links or it's only manual ?
(Maybe a bot account per site?)

If not, can you please add links for the protected pages:
[fr:Accueil]] for "Main Page" and [[fr:Pacman]] for Pacman's page

One last question, is there some specific things to do to import translated pages to our wiki regarding license and contributors ?
We plan to import all pages in Category:Français with their history (so contributors names will remain), is this ok ?

thanks.

pointone · 2011-03-10 17:15:46

Update of interwiki links is manual at this point. I have no experience with MediaWiki bots, personally; please elaborate if you believe this could be a viable solution.

See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Export and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Import for additional information.

As long as your wiki uses the GFDL license (which it does) there should be no license concerns.

One problem you might run into concerns duplicate user names. That is, if UserA contributed to an article on this wiki, you import the article and its history on your wiki, and there exists or someone creates an account with name "UserA" that is not the same individual represented by that user name on this wiki.

*Edit*:

Regarding update of interwiki links: After you have imported a page to your wiki, please edit the page here to redirect to your wiki. For example, after importing Pacman (Français), change its content here to #REDIRECT [[fr:Pacman]].

I have added interwiki language links to the Main Page and pacman pages.

Last edited by pointone (2011-03-10 17:23:34)

kynikos · 2012-06-11 21:41:04

This thread is sticky, so I guess this is not necro-bumping ^^

I'm just announcing that in the next few days Template:i18n will be deprecated and replaced by interlanguage links (e.g. [[en:Title]]) also for the languages hosted locally. This operation will be completely performed by a bot. For more information, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/He … plate:i18n and https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ar … nalization.

ternaldius · 2016-08-07 10:48:20

Any update on the Swedish pages?

Because this is what comes up when you click the link to the wiki...

Fyi, it says "parked at Loopia"; some guy owns it. So... you guys know what's up? I'm all for translating the Installation and Beginner's Guide by the way.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-04-15 13:05:28

International Wikis (2010 edition)

#2 2010-04-16 03:02:30

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#3 2010-04-16 03:22:54

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#4 2010-04-18 16:27:07

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#5 2010-04-22 09:23:44

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#6 2010-07-02 08:52:43

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#7 2010-07-04 00:15:46

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#8 2010-10-06 20:45:52

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#9 2010-12-14 21:29:59

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#10 2010-12-14 21:33:28

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#11 2011-02-23 22:16:31

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#12 2011-02-24 00:22:04

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#13 2011-02-24 09:18:50

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#14 2011-02-24 17:08:10

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#15 2011-02-24 19:21:08

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#16 2011-02-26 02:00:24

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#17 2011-02-26 11:38:37

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#18 2011-02-28 19:44:58

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#19 2011-03-06 13:07:26

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#20 2011-03-10 17:15:46

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#21 2012-06-11 21:41:04

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

#22 2016-08-07 10:48:20

Re: International Wikis (2010 edition)

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