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#1 2006-11-09 18:01:53

foxbunny
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ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

I will discuss the namespaces regarding a multilingual setup of ArchWiki.

First of all, I want all of you, more technical peole, to read this and comment here.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Namespace

Wat do we need for a practical multilingual setup?

First of all, it has been suggested that namespaces can be a good way of getting rid of categories. I agree, but not completely. I think we could use both. Use namespaces for categorizations like article type (HOWTOs, Tuts, etc), and leave topics in category form.

However, for a multilingual setup, we need to have namespace 'chains'. For example, I want Serbian HOWTOs, etc, so I go to ":српски:howtos:Faster pacman downloads using wget". The title of the article title is then automatically translated (i.e, it's altogether independent from the article name by which it is identified on the ArchWiki site) to "Бржи pacman даунлоуд уз помоћ wget алата". Or vice versa. Would it be possible to implement?

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#2 2006-11-09 21:35:52

dtw
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

Could the respective admins port this thread to the non-english forums, please!  It's tough to discuss the best thing for multilingual in English!

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#3 2006-11-09 22:46:11

foxbunny
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

dtw wrote:

Could the respective admins port this thread to the non-english forums, please!  It's tough to discuss the best thing for multilingual in English!

dtw, please don't distract people from the topic. wink

Come on, people, I really need to know about this, and I think I'm not the only one (I hope, to be precise). sad

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#4 2006-11-09 23:04:52

Dusty
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

It looks like the process of adding a namespace is not trivial. Its not hard to do, but it does require editing one of the php pages on the server, which means that we need to have someone who has access to the server to do it.  This means that namespaces should not be used for things that regular users or even people with sysop privleges may want to do often. Adding a new namespaces for languages is something that shouldn't have to happen too often (its not like new languages are introduced every day), but adding a new namespace for categories is probably not as good an idea.

Using namespaces instead of categories for languages would reduce the category hierarchy by one level. I can't tell if its possible to have nested namespaces; that page is kind of poorly written that way. I'm also uncertain about the title rewriting thing. It would be nice to find some more information on using namespaces for multi-language wikis.

Pierre has told me that he wishes to maintain the German wiki separately from archlinux.org; I'm not sure about the other community projects. Perhaps it would be better to have all these separate, although I personally would rather have them all in one wiki; it reduces the total amount of maintenance required, and it allows the international pages to be interlinked to each other.

Dusty

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#5 2006-11-09 23:47:36

cactus
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

dusty. you can still do interwiki links.. to another wiki.
It just has to be added to the config file somewhere....

gah.. it has been so long since I setup mediawiki.. and it was not exactly trivial to get some of the more esoteric options set in a usable fashion...

*head scratching*


"Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." -- Postel's Law
"tacos" -- Cactus' Law
"t̥͍͎̪̪͗a̴̻̩͈͚ͨc̠o̩̙͈ͫͅs͙͎̙͊ ͔͇̫̜t͎̳̀a̜̞̗ͩc̗͍͚o̲̯̿s̖̣̤̙͌ ̖̜̈ț̰̫͓ạ̪͖̳c̲͎͕̰̯̃̈o͉ͅs̪ͪ ̜̻̖̜͕" -- -̖͚̫̙̓-̺̠͇ͤ̃ ̜̪̜ͯZ͔̗̭̞ͪA̝͈̙͖̩L͉̠̺͓G̙̞̦͖O̳̗͍

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#6 2006-11-10 00:36:27

foxbunny
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

Cactus, is there any chance we get to test drive DokuWiki or the latest version of MediaWiki? How hard would it be to set up either of that? Just empty wiki with some basic templates, for testing purposes.

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#7 2006-11-10 00:42:20

Dusty
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

foxbunny wrote:

Cactus, is there any chance we get to test drive DokuWiki or the latest version of MediaWiki? How hard would it be to set up either of that?

Tardo's already set up an example dokuwiki:

http://www.nagi-fanboi.net/dokuwiki/dok … :archlinux

Dusty

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#8 2006-11-10 01:16:52

tardo
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

I have the latest version of MediaWiki installed too. Just nothing in it.

http://nagi-fanboi.net/mediawiki/index. … =Main_Page

Feel free to register and play around with it.

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#9 2006-11-10 04:24:43

cheer
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From: Russia, St. Petersburg
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Posts: 131

Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

I agree with idea of having all separate wikis, but at one domain: en.wiki.archlinux.org, fr.wiki., ru.wiki, etc. This partition was implemented on wikipedia as I can understand, so it's quite good I think.

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#10 2006-11-12 23:00:46

foxbunny
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From: Serbia
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

cheer wrote:

I agree with idea of having all separate wikis, but at one domain: en.wiki.archlinux.org, fr.wiki., ru.wiki, etc. This partition was implemented on wikipedia as I can understand, so it's quite good I think.

I've sort of missed it.

This is not a good thing. Main reason is that it prevents inter-language searching. If one language contains no article about, say, pacman, then searching for pacman in its domain would turn out no results. That's okay if the person speaks only that language, but if he speaks multiple languages, he/she'd most likely want to see in what other languages an article about pacman is available.

Namespaces is the most logical solution.

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#11 2006-11-13 10:58:37

cheer
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From: Russia, St. Petersburg
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Posts: 131

Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

If one speaks several languages, he/she'd search several wiki's; we can see this on wikipedia, yes?

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#12 2006-11-13 12:09:58

foxbunny
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

cheer wrote:

If one speaks several languages, he/she'd search several wiki's; we can see this on wikipedia, yes?

If you want to do a search in some language using the search engine, you have to switch to that language before searching. You can't search ALL languages AT ONCE. Namespaces, IMHO, are a far better solution. And probably easier to implement than multiple domans.

I've asked tardo to make a few language namespaces on his installation of MediaWiki, so we'll have a proof of concept soon.

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#13 2006-11-13 15:30:35

Dusty
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

I agree that it would be better to have namespaces for each language, rather than separate wikis. Mediawiki is designed to scale very large, so we may as well have all the languages in one wiki. The headache of maintaining one wiki installation is bad enough, having to maintain several is just too much work. They'd all have to be updated independently, styles applied independently, etc. And each would have its own database to maintain, etc.

There doesn't seem to be much conceptual difference between: en.wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page and wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/en:Main_Page. Just the location of the en. Using namespaces will allow the language dependent pages to be isolated from the other languages (I believe its possible to search and browse only one namespace), just as using subdomains would be. However, it will also simultaneously allow the wikis to be integrated. Isolated and integrated at the same time, you really can't beat that. Light is both a particle and a wave....

I have access to the MediaWiki installation now, but not the database (though I'm sure I can get it if I need it). I think that means that I can set up new namespaces now. :-)

Dusty

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#14 2006-11-13 15:40:30

foxbunny
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From: Serbia
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

Dusty wrote:

There doesn't seem to be much conceptual difference between: en.wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page and wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/en:Main_Page.

Actually, there is one major pain in the behind with namespaces. See, there is a namespace called "Category:". Ouch! If we can't nest namespaces (and I'm pretty sure we can't), we can't have both namespaces and categories. *bangs head against a wall... twice*

EDIT:

As a workaround, we may have to also create a "Category:" namespace for EVERY language. For example:

English category:System administration
Српске категорије:Одржавање система
日本語カテゴリ-:システム・アドミニストレーション

Moreover, we need to have language namespaces for EVERY language, too. For pages, that is.

English:
Српски:
日本語:

One namespace for cetegory tree and one namespace for a language = two namespaces per language. (That is, if those can't be nested, which would be logically impossible.)

EDIT:

One more note. Every namespace is prefixed to a page. Therefore, we'd have pages that are titled:

English:Pacman
Српски:Pacman
日本語:Pacman (パクマン)

Of course, that' better than having:

Pacman (English)
Pacman (српски)
Pacman (パクマン) (日本語)

But is nevertheless a bit ugly. It would be better if we could make ArchWiki to substitute the title only form full namespace+title on a page, and use the latter form for reference only.

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#15 2006-11-13 15:59:51

foxbunny
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

There's currently no way of finding out which namespaces are set up on ArchWiki.... sad

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#16 2006-11-13 16:03:52

Romashka
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Registered: 2005-12-07
Posts: 1,054

Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

foxbunny wrote:

There's currently no way of finding out which namespaces are set up on ArchWiki.... sad

I'm sure Dusty can look for this in some config file.


to live is to die

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#17 2006-11-13 16:40:36

Dusty
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From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

foxbunny wrote:

Actually, there is one major pain in the behind with namespaces. See, there is a namespace called "Category:". Ouch! If we can't nest namespaces (and I'm pretty sure we can't), we can't have both namespaces and categories. *bangs head against a wall... twice*

From this page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categories

I got this quote:

A page in any namespace can be put in a category by adding a category tag to the page

So I *think* we're safe. However, its yet another confusing convoluted way of dealing with things for media wiki. These guys don't know the first thing about KISS!

Our current wiki doesn't appear to have any extra namespaces only those defined on the namespaces page foxbunny originally linked.

Dusty

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#18 2006-11-13 16:52:12

foxbunny
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From: Serbia
Registered: 2006-10-31
Posts: 759
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Re: ArchWiki: About implementing namespaces

A page in any namespace can be put in a category by adding a category tag to the page

That seems be a solution. DokuWiki also supports nested namespaces on top of this, though. KISS. smile

BTW, I've created an Arch KISS (or, indeed, KISS Arch) logo, but the actual kiss is a rip-off, so I'm still looking for GPL'd or PD'd artwork before I release it. I'm planning to feature it on the ArchWiki home page. big_smile

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