Hi Erik,
My very first post to this group (at the end of 2004??) was a question
asking how to achieve this. It is a very complicated topic and one
that goes to the heart of usability. I am really pleased that this
work is going ahead and impressed with your specification.
My only question is what happens to first time users?
Under your proposed system users will not have to log on to change the
UI. This is clearly a great improvement. But will it be possible to
define a default UI language for a particular page? where no
preference for UI has been selected?
At the moment the default UI is defined by the MediaWiki set-up. So
someone clicking on the "Deutsch" link from
www.wikipedia.org goes to
"de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite" where the content is in German and
the UI is automatically delivered in German too.
It would be good if this system could be preserved somehow.
Best wishes
Paul
On 1/17/06, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote:
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
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