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#1 2011-11-09 17:18:58

kushou
Member
Registered: 2011-11-09
Posts: 2

[WIKI] Need details on translation.

Hi there,

I'm a bit lost right now, and I need to understand something about translation of the wiki. Two months ago, I wanted to contribute to the wiki by translating articles from english to french. I clicked on "French" on wiki's first page and was redirected to the French website (archlinux.fr) to contribute to their wiki instead of the official one (which is pretty empty, compared to the official one). I then read the sticky post here to see that wiki admins decided to move every non-english articles to their own websites (.{fr,it,de,...}). I thought that it was a really bad idea to separate international wikis on several websites (I can understand forum separation though), and gave up.

Fast forward, I checked out wiki yesterday as I did months ago and saw that the first page was back up (hooray), but it is pretty empty (some articles were deleted). There is also a notice about archlinux.fr, which is fine. Anyway, here is my question: Where should I contribute now?

If I trust Wiki's news, it's in here. If I trust the sticky post, it's on archlinux.fr. If I trust what I can see, you changed your mind and I know should contribute on archlinux.org again? What do I do?

Thank you for reading.

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#2 2011-11-09 17:29:32

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: [WIKI] Need details on translation.

What's so bad about having separate wikis?
I think the consensus is still that it would be best if every language has it's own wiki. There are few French articles on https://wiki.archlinux.org/ : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ca … n%C3%A7ais

There has been another idea recently: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=128610

Last edited by karol (2011-11-09 17:32:00)

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#3 2011-11-09 17:57:49

kushou
Member
Registered: 2011-11-09
Posts: 2

Re: [WIKI] Need details on translation.

The fact that it is a bad idea is my own opinion. It is based on three facts:
- If you split on several websites, wikis don't use the same software (especially if it's patched).
- You have to follow two websites when you're translating and want similar articles, or you'll have two really different wikis (take a look at http://oldwiki.archlinux.fr ...)
- There are several sources of information for users.  Who's official? Who's da best? Who is up to date?

Btw, if you look the french article explaining what is Arch Linux for example ( http://wiki.archlinux.fr/Arch_Linux ), it is not complete, the link to the english page is small. More over, if you go on the official page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux , every language is on .org but the french article, that seems missing. There is actually a link to the french website, but it is not present on spanish page for example. If I discovered archlinux and its wiki nowadays, without knowing english, I would be lost.

I am maybe wrong here, but not using the same software disable the possibility to use i18n which is a great thing btw. We can use redirections but it is a pain in the ass to add a page for each article on each wikis that redirect on the good wiki.

I tried to find discussions that issued this decision, but I didn't find it. I have to agree that I didn't spend a lot of time searching it.

I hope I am clear, this time it wasn't proofread hmm

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#4 2011-11-09 18:15:44

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: [WIKI] Need details on translation.

Even the English wiki is not fully up to date, the reason being insufficient manpower. Not sure you understand how much work is needed to translate the wiki and keep it up to date ...
French, German and Polish used to be external wikis, so it's not only the French one.

kushou wrote:

There is actually a link to the french website, but it is not present on spanish page for example.

Previously the links were only on the English articles, I think it''s going to change and they will get added either automatically or <sigh> manually.

There's a technical problem with having multiple languages together: you can't easily restrict searches to one language only, so you can get hits that are worthless to you, because you don't speak these languages e.g. you get articles in Russian or Spanish even if you speak only English.
It would be nice if we could verify the information added to the wiki. It's currently not always possible as e.g. apart from the editor that made those changes nobody speaks Chinese.


Some previous topics:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=87189
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=95360

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