[IAEP] Multiple-language pages on wiki

[John Watlington]

On Jan 13, 2010, at 8:52 AM, Mel Chua wrote:

>> Do you know how to add several languages in our wiki?
>
> Poking the iaep metabrain, in case someone else has better ideas...
>
> I know of several ways of doing multiple languages with mediawiki,  
> none
> of which are super-ideal.
>
> * the way Wikipedia does it - multiple mediawiki installs, one per
> language (de.wikipedia.org is a separate install from  
> en.wikipedia.org)
> and crosslinks between the different language instances for the same
> term/article. There's no real good way to make sure the content in one
> language is synced with the same content in another.
>
> * the way the OLPC wiki does it: all-in-one-mediawiki-instance, with
> page titles in the different languages. [[Sugar]] and [[Azucar]], for
> instance. Same syncing problem as above.

Speaking as someone who maintains pages in two languages on
the OLPC Wiki, the translation template does provide a link on every
translated page that lets readers compare the "canonical language page"
which was used to generate the tranlsation with the current  
"canonical language page".

> * There's a nice Google Translate template at the top (see the blue  
> bar
> across the top of http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Summer_of_Content) that
> works pretty well, though it doesn't help people who want to edit in a
> language that the page isn't in.

Unedited google translations are painful to read (but better than  
nothing).

> * Also using http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Summer_of_Content as an  
> example:
> inline translation (BAD IDEA, does not scale). You can see the French
> words inline with the English, and how it makes the page harder to  
> read
> for readers of /either/ language (imo).

Such a bad idea it shouldn't even have been mentioned!

Cheers,
wad