Forum:This Wikia is now multilingual

Forums: Index > Watercooler > This Wikia is now multilingual

We started with English. Then User:tasc in Argentina got us into Spanish. Now User:Baronnet in Paris has added a third language of European origin.

It is probably time to ask Central Wikia for help in getting internal interwiki links organised so that we can gradually translate the main help pages and anything else we feel like doing.

Robin Patterson 12:44, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Considerable progress since then, including three dozen articles in French and some Norwegian and Dutch. With the occasional sight of Portuguese and Russian. Not to mention some policy pages etc. See also Category:Articles by language. Good! — Robin Patterson (Talk) 09:22, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Another request to do things in Dutch. I had a look at "Template:Showinfo children". The French version is "Template:Showinfo children (fr)". I can make "Template:Showinfo children (nl)" but would it not be more logical to make "Template:Tooninfo kinderen"? rtol 11:25, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Speed and logic support it. But coding? Phlox probably knows; I don't know; it might mess up some template that creates a link to it. You could check which templates link to the French and English ones. If in doubt, create the "nl" one; it can just be moved if the expert says that's OK. (And that way, Anglophones who might be helping, on occasions, can use the English-language one if they prefer.) — Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:03, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

I'll build "Template:Showinfo children (nl)" to do the work, and "Template:Tooninfo kinderen" as an alias.

By the way, one can apparently see the Dutch parts of this wiki when logged in, but not when not. rtol 13:04, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, no "Preferences" when not logged in. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 04:39, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

There are now Dutch versions of {{Showinfo person}} and {{Showinfo children}}. See Richard S.J. Tol (1969-). rtol 08:02, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Responding to the arrival of SMW

I see that our good supporter Fred is now very sportingly redirecting articles to English names, e.g. Karel II der Franken 823-877‎ (diff; hist) . . (+40) . . Bergsmit (Talk | contribs | block) (Redirected page to Charles the Bald (823-877)).

I had been wondering about them, particularly in relation to Project Charlemagne, where the only things apparently missing from the instructions are about article naming and/or how to check that you are not creating a duplicate by adding a child to someone. If a contributor had been working their way down and found someone with a child named Charles the Bald, they might have created a new article not realising that Karel II der Franken was the same chap. Now we have the original as a redirect, so that any search for either should find at least one of them. But the next step for Karel II der Franken could be to create a "/en" page tied to his page that carries the actual redirect to the English then to rewrite Karel II der Franken in the appropriate Continental language as described in Genealogy:Multilingual articles.

However, what do our [[SMW} gurus have to say about that?

It has occurred to me that you experts just might learn something from the JewAge site, which exists happily in three languages, before ploughing too far ahead into any changes to the current system.

— Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:01, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Through use of stuff like hooks and custom code, the wikmedia software is dramatically customizable in the fashion you see at this site. I'd love for us to do it the way they are, but look at how they do articles. All navigation is through Special: pages eg Special:JPersonProfile (probably custom php scripts). All edits are in special popup windows. Articles presented are actually composites. If you can persuade wikia to allow this level of intrusion into the site software, then great- we can do this stuff. However, I already have inquired at Wikia central if there were a way just to do the basics- to have logged out users have the UI be in alternate languages as JewAge is doing. There were responses, but no solution. You are welcome to pursue it by giving them pointers to the JewAge site, and asking what customizations we are permitted to do that have an effect equivalent to the feature you are interested in.

SMW has freed us from many of the constraints of the prior multilingual approach we were taking. We need not now tie articles to the base english article by making it a subpage. The Hague / Den Haag (nl) demonstrates this. Logged out users will be able to arrive at an article in their language and read it. The UI will be in english, but we can put a banner note on these articles that explains that if an account is created the wikia UI will be in their native language. If you click on the nederlands button from Hague, you will see that I can change the wikia UI for one article. As soon as they move away from that article though, the UI goes back to english.

The Jewage site has interesting UI elements, and some good structural elements. The are also releasing information under GFDL, so they are being cool about content. More importantly in terms of fundamentals, I note they are asking for input from users, but not asking for sources. That is stunning from a genealogy standards perspective. They have a sources field, but it is not exposed in the UI when entering dates or what not. See for yourself. Go to any person article, edit personal details. Fancy popup window, nice parchment like edge. But dang. You can enter all these dates but they don't ask you why you believe any of it is anything but shear fantasy, or hearsay from the failing memory of an elderly relative. So none of the information the user is entering is independently verifiable. Take a look at their property lists. It tells a different story about their level of database sophistication. And as far as content goes, they are a little thin. Sure they have several hundred articles. Look at the content. Aside from the handful of articles on famous figures, it's the Gedcom shovel at work again, and pretty thin at that.

Let's drill down on a subject. Here, we learn that the "birth place" was "г. Володарск-Волынский Житомирская обл.". Hey I thought the site was multilingual! What the heck with this unintelligible place name. Well, maybe it is actually wikipedia:Volodymyr-Volynskyi,Zhytomyr Who knows- their "semantics" didn't record that- nor do they even have a mechanism to disambiguate place names, let alone display the name in an alternate language as they do for person names.

Let's make sure that when we use something that has the name semantics in it that we are actually capturing semantics that matter to genealogy. -~ Phlox 18:05, 1 June 2009 (UTC)