A component milestone of Wikidata/WiktionaryZ development is true
multi-language support for page titles and content on the MediaWiki
level. We have funding to pay a developer to implement it (I'll be
working on versioning and object/relational mapping in the meantime),
and I have written the first set of specifications for this:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki
Note that this is in no way a proposal to merge existing Wikimedia
projects; in fact, MediaWiki should be fully backwards compatible and
continue to act exactly as it does now in monolingual installations
(there'll be a couple of new features, such as persistent UI language
selection for anonymous users). However, multilanguage support should be
enabled for wikis like Commons and Meta, where multiple languages are
handled in a single database.
I think I've come up with a fairly clever way of dealing with the
community issues of language filtering, but see for yourself. In any
event, I'd much appreciate feedback on this proposal before we go ahead
with the implementation, especially from Brion as the release manager. :-)
Best,
Erik