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) -- Swedish (Svensk)

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?

Those lines come from a configuration file that the public can't access (I beleive). Send translations to mailto:jasonr@bomis.com, and I will update them.

• 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

I take full responsibility for having caused such massive protest. I just picked a bunch of languages. I didn't follow the discussions that took place, I just responded to the JobRequest that I received. Many apologies. I'll get the Swedish wiki running within the hour. I'll make it available as any of {sve,swe,sv,swedish,svensk}.wikipedia.com

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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.

For most ISO-8859-1 characters (most European languages), the only thing that is needed is to enable the $NonEnglish setting in the configuration file. (Some languages like Polish need other characters which would require a bit more work.) --CliffordAdams

I made this change in the configuration files. I don't know if it is now working or not. Anybody? -- JasonR

Yep, seems to work, at least it accepts letters with accents --AstroNomer

It will indeed now let me correctly title the Cómo se edita una página page, but the links to it don't show up right away (that's another problem already being worked on). Also, the URLs seem to have unprotected and untranslated non-ASCII characters in them (e.g. http://es.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Cómo_se_edita_una_página), which is a bad idea in the long run. HTML4 recommends that they first be translated into UTF-8, then URL-encoded. It's probably OK to do it the way it is for now, and then do the fix automatically later (which is doable so long as we don't create any Wikis in languages outside of the ISO-8859-1 set). So for now Dr. Erdem is out of luck (can't do Turkish until we have this working correctly), but everyone else can create good content. -- LDC

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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??

Toan: I just checked the [RecentChanges link at the Spanish branch] and tried to change something on it, it's fine now. I'm not sure why it didn't work before.

It still doesn't work, sorry.  :-) It doesn't keep track of minor edits. --KoyaanisQatsi

Apparently, minor edits are not supposed to go into the RecentChanges page. You mark them 'minor' because you don't want people to think that the page has been changed significantly enough to warrant another look. If you want it to be in RecentChanges, your best bet is not to mark it as a minor edit. --JasonR-

No, that's not it exactly, though it made me realize what the problem was. Each language Wikipedia has its own preferences and sets its own cookies, independently of the others. I can see the minor edits now, after changing the Preferences from es.wikipedia.com.- -KoyaanisQatsi.

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On de.wikipedia links are not displayed the way they should be. Links to pages made in the last two weeks or so are dtill displayed as edit link (i.e. as though the page still wouldn't exist). The Film link on Home Page is just one example. Can anyone please fix this? It is really difficult to use de.wikipedia as long as this is not working... -SoniC

This does seem to be worse on de.wikipedia.com, guys. Can you please look into it...? Or should I make a JobRequest? SoniC, we're aware of this problem; it has been plaguing www.wikipedia.com for months... --LMS