[Foundation-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has subdomains)

Mon Jul 19 05:04:53 UTC 2004

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Having multiple languages in one wiki doesn't help people to come  
> together. In fact, in my experience, it does the exact opposite.  
> Parcipation on Meta by people from languages like Chinese or Japanese is  
> minimal. I'm afraid Meta is perceived as an extension of the English  
> language Wikipedia.

There is no reason why MediaWiki can't become multilingual. Since this has not
happened on its own (probably due to the use of subdomains) we could use some
of our award money to put a bounty on that. Somebody already tried to submit a
patch for this but here is my idea:

*Have /xx subpages for each MediaWiki page where xx is a language code and the
localized message is on the subpage.
*create a language tagging system for articles; pages tagged for language xx
will switch the user interface to language xx.
*create @lang=xx as a url hack for forcing such a change via links - overriding
any page tag. 
*add an option in user preferences to override per page interface language tags
and url hacks. 

We could also use the current category system to classify pages based on the
language they are written in. Then using related changes from a category page
would give a language-specific RC (yes, RC from category doesn't work yet, but
I consider that a major bug). 

> You can't eliminate the language barrier by throwing all languages into  
> one big pot. That only means that the most popular common one - English -  
> will dominate and small pockets of non-English discussions will form. This  
> is what has happened on the multilingual mailing lists and it is what will  
> continue to happen on Meta if we stay on the current path.

Balkanization is not an answer either. Making Meta truly multi-lingual is the
key. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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