Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination

This page will eventually be refactored to be a list or presentation of our foreign language versions. But for now, we can use it as our International Wikipedia 'Talk' page.

I have set up [catalan.wikipedia.com Catalan Wikipedia] and [deutsche.wikipedia.com Deutsche Wikipedia] (German) and [nihongo.wikipedia.com Nihongo no Wikpedia] (Japanese), and I anxiously expect there to be some problems or complaints as people start to use them.

I think that we should have French and Spanish next, but I don't know how to write 'French' and 'Spanish' correctly. If someone will tell me, I will set them up.

And then any other languages can be set up very quickly.

I would anticipate that a certain amount of "critical mass" is necessary in order for a wiki to "take off". Without 5-10 people eagerly writing and arguing and playing with each other, it wouldn't be as much fun. So I encourage anyone who likes to have a wiki in their own language to also go out and announce/recruit for it.  :-)

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How's about using ccTLDs instead (like de, fr, it, jp, tw and so on). This might save some trouble.

Not a bad idea, but some of those are difficult for Americans to get. --Jimbo Wales

But the alternative language wikis aren't for Americans. All Germans, Austrians, etc. will instantly recognize de.wikipedia.com. -- Larry Sanger

I meant -- hard for me (an American) to procure and use. So yes, de.wikipedia.com sounds good to me. I'm just explaining why I don't rush out and get wikipedia.de. --Jimbo Wales

I thought de.wikipedia.com is just a standard way of pointing to www.wikipedia.com/de/ . Do you have to get permission from German authorities to use de.wikipedia.com? I know you'd have to for wikipedia.de, of course. -- Larry Sanger

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Spanish has two problems. If you go with Español, you have the problem of the letter "ñ" that you can not use in links. But not all Spanish speakers will call their language Español, but Castellano (Castilian). I do not know what is the current consensus. I'll do some research. (Every Spanish speaker will recognize Castellano and it has standards. It seems that every Spanish speaking American community has its own local variations. -- DickBeldin)

Notice that there I do not need a single answer. I can point multiple domain names at the same Spanish language site. So I can use:

espanol.wikipedia.com

spanish.wikipedia.com

castellano.wikipedia.com

supaingo.wikipedia.com (Japanese!)

That sounds good, though I doubt of the usefulness of supaingo :)

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There are already lots of standards in place here, folks: ISO 639-1 contains two-letter codes for languages (these are not the same as country codes for the obvious reason that languages aren't countries and vice versa), and ISO 639-2/B is a more comprehensive list of 3-letter codes. All use no special characters, and are commonly used in bibliographic databases. The standard 2- and 3-letter codes we might use are:

English: en, eng

French: fr, fre

German: de, ger

Spanish (Castellano): es, spa

Catalan: ca, cat

Japanese: ja (not the country code jp), jpn

This particular list of codes deliberately makes no distinction between what it considers dialects of the same language, no matter how much native speakers might protest for political reasons. I.e., Americans have to settle for "en", Austrians who vocally claim to speak Austrian must settle for "de", and Mexicans, Cubans, Colombians, and Spaniards all have to share "es" (though other languages spoken in Spain, e.g. Catalan, are different enough to merit their own code). The 3-letter codes are far more comprehensive than the 2-letter ones. This is a rational approach: someone from Madrid may have trouble speaking face-to-face with, say, a Venezuelan, but they both read books written in "es" in college.

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It was said that the answer doesn't have to be unique. A name with code and one (or more) with names. For spanish could be es.wikipedia.com castellano.wikipedia.com espanol.wikipedia.com

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HTML 4 already deals (correctly IMHO) with character set issues, and we should follow that spec, but how the Wiki software deals with special characters in titles is an open issue.