On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 09:27:15 +0100, Paul Youlten <paul.youlten(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I want to start a wiki where users have the option to
use a different
language front-end - but all the data is held in one central database. So if
I search from the German start page - I might get results that were
originally added in Spanish or French.
Is there an elegant way of achieving this?
Well, as of version 1.4 (currently in beta) MediaWiki allows each user
to select the language used by the *interface*. Thus you could have a
site that was multilingual (as
http://meta.wikimedia.org is, at least
theoretically) and people could search whatever was there, translating
for each other's convenience as necessary. [For obvious reasons,
automatic translation is not a good idea.]
Alternatively, you could have multiple instances of MediaWiki with
appropriate interlanguage linking (as currently used by Wikipedia),
and come up with some kind of "meta search" that could find content in
any of them - some work has gone into abstracted search systems, I
believe, specifically in relation to "Lucene" (?); but no-one, as far
as I know, has developed a multi-MediaWiki search engine (apart from
Google with an appropriate "site:..." term, of course!)
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]