Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Larry Sanger (talk | contribs) at 07:28, 14 June 2001. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Wiki encyclopedias have been started in other languages:

Catalan (Catalan) -- Chinese (Hanyu) -- German (Deutsch) -- Esperanto -- French (Français) -- Hebrew (Ivrit) -- Italian (Italiano) -- Japanese (Nihongo) -- Portuguese (Português) -- Russian (Russkiy) -- Spanish (Castellano) -- 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. Please see /TextToTranslate for a list of phrases that need translated
  • Anything else?

Please suggest new language Wikipedias below!

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).

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


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

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.

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

This Problem still exists. I've tried to put in some article about computer related items on 2001-05-22. The referring links still are maintained as edit links. This is frustrating. Is there a workaround, e.g. use old-style-links, do something twice?? Just to keep on starting this amazing project..

BTW What is 'summary' for?

I just read that the Wikipedia config file has an option ($NONENGLISH) that allows the usage of special characters (umlauts, accented letters) in links. Do you think this could be activated for the International Wikipedias (last time I checked de.wikipedia, it didn't work, so I guess it is not activated yet...) --SoniC

I just created the Kurt Gödel page (just a stub--sorry, my German isn't up to a full article) with no problem. The Spanish one works too, so KQ doesn't have to write a cien anos article :-) (For the non-Spanish speakers here who don't get the joke, KQ points out a good example of the importance of diacriticals. In most Spanish text they don't make much difference, and even native speakers frequently leave them out, but the "año/ano" distinction makes a difference: "Tengo 40 años" means "I am 40 years old"; "Tengo 40 anos" means "I have 40 anuses".) --LDC

Hey, cool, it really seems to work now. Thanks, guys :-) --Sonic

I may have spoken too soon. It appears that URLs in the form ".../wiki.cgi?Kurt_Gödel" work fine, but URLs in the form ".../wiki/Kurt_Gödel" do not (at least on my Father's Windows box I'm using now), and some links are the latter form. The latter form does work if encoded as ".../wiki/Kurt_G%F6del" (Same results on the Spanish site). I'm not sure who's at fault here; well, that's not quite right. We're at fault for using illegal URLs, but the fact that we get away with it in some places and not others I don't know the reason for. At any rate, I suppose we need to do this right sooner than I expected. --LDC

As you might have seen on Wikipedia-L, our man Jason (as in "Jason, Jason, he's our man, if he can't do it, nobody can!") is going to update the wiki software that runs all the Wikipedias (interesting how "Wikipedia" has, overnight, become the name of a type). I asked him to switch this setting on, or keep it switched on, and pay attention to this page... --LMS

<complaint> The links on the German Wikipedia still don't work:-( WojPob</complaint>

Everything seems to be working now!!!! WTG Jason! (or whoever fixed it!) --AstroNomer

Also, the new wiki canonization is working in the spanish wikipedia (at least).

...Which resulted in "losing" pages with lowercase names; this needs to be resolved before doing it to the main Wikipedia. Also, the created links now use the ".../wiki.cgi?" URL form which seems to work with foreign characters, but the URLs themselves are still illegal, so this is only an interim solution. --LDC

What I would do (if I thought this would solve the problem...) would be to search for all pages, and just scan through them for all the pages (which are all SUBpages, right?) that begin with lower-case letters. Then just change them to uppercase letters. --LMS

Aha, but the one link (which does lead to some text) on ru.wikipedia.com still does not show up as a link. And de.wikipedia.com links are still not working either! --LMS

It's not just subpages, but every page with more than a one-word title where any words begin with lowercase. --LDC

Can it be that this de-nonlink-problem is due to German Umlaute e.g. äöü which in some other Codes maybe interpreted as some kind of brackets {} ? I had this in some years ago in one Turbo-Pascal programm source.. StefanRybo

It looks to me like the linking problem is fixed (I tested this on two of the wikis), and the new wikis are using the parentheses. Could you help us test this by going there and writing something (with parentheses)? --LMS

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