Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination

Wiki encyclopedias have been started in other languages:

Catalan (Catalana) -- Chinese -- Esperanto -- French (Francais) -- German (Deutsch) --- Hebrew -- Italian (Italiano) -- Japanese (Nihongo) -- Portuguese (Português) -- Russian (Russkiy) -- Spanish (Español)

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 we encourage anyone who wants to build a wiki in their own language to also go out and announce/recruit for it.  :-)

Here are some "international Wikipedia" policy questions. To a certain extent, these questions will resolve themselves, though.

• How are the various Wikipedias going to be coordinated, if at all? Will we have several quite different articles in different languages? Will English be a lingua franca? See /Coordination to discuss.
• What are some suggestions about what can be put on new language Wikipedia home pages? See /Homepages to discuss.
• What are some suggestions about how to use "international Wikipedias" for purposes of Nupedia article translation projects? See /Nupedia Translation to discuss.
• I have just noticed the fact that the top and bottom bars are in english. Can something be done about that?
• Anything else?

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Please suggest new language Wikipedias below!

For my own personal taste I would very much like a wikipedia in swedish. The best name for it would be svensk.wikipedia.com with the canonical sv.wikipedia.com as a complement. LinusTolke

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I officially (?!) protest that the swedish page was not set up with the last batch of international wikipedias... LinusTolke had been one of the first people to request one. Also, I would have liked to have a castellano.wikipedia.com name, pointing to es.wikipedia.com, but there is not. --AstroNomer

I noticed that. I protest as well! --LMS

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Might I suggest that the international Wikis be given a distinctive logo, or background color, or something else so that navigating among them becomes easier? Hopping back and forth is difficult (also the German homepage does not have a link to the English homepage). Finally, we may want to come up with some semi-automated process to create pages that refer back to the English versions. For example, until we have some Spanish contributors, I'd like be able to create pages such as Ahora no hay página española en este tema. Usted puede desear leer el artículo (link) en inglés. Si usted puede, ayudarnos traduciendo estos artículos.; Perhaps we could just replace the "Describe the new page here" text? --LDC

I think it's just a matter of sending Toan or Jason an appropriate logo to upload, and also supplying them with the non-English text to use (and where it goes).

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I think a way should be worked out to allow non-english characters in article names; otherwise it will become a thorny issue later. There are, of course, cases where the absence of an accent, tilde, or umlaut changes a meaning completely. Imagine the unintential hilarity of entries such as Cien anos de soledad. Also, it may eventually cause confusion over names, thought I can't think of any examples right offhand. And, as a courtesy, could we translate "edit text of this page," "RecentChanges," "HomePage," etc. to the appropriate language for each non-English branch?--KoyaanisQatsi

This would be a good thing to bring up on feature requests.

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Also, the [RecentChanges link at the Spanish branch] does not update, or at least does not update within four hours.--KQ

Whoa, that's a problem. Guys??