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

Mon Jul 19 06:04:00 UTC 2004

Daniel-
> 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

... which was woefully incomplete. I am completely in favor of properly  
internationalizing MediaWiki and putting a bounty on the implementation.
However, such an implementation should be generic, i.e. it should allow us  
to migrate Wikipedia itself into that system. This requires some way to  
deal with namespace conflicts - e.g. wikimedia.org/en/Merchandising vs.  
wikimedia.org/de/Merchandising (the current Merchandising page on Meta is  
actually German), and we would have to set up automatic redirects for  
subdomain access. Given that, setting subdomains up now while we don't  
have this advanced code will put us well on the road to a nice general  
solution for all Wikimedia projects once we have it.

Regards,

Erik