Idea: Change the names of translated homepages
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I did some thinking about the issue today. We are about to get* the groups feature out of the door and into public beta. Then one could found a ... say ... Dutch group. For that group, one could request a wiki... See where I'm going?
Other than that, it probably makes sense to come up with some sane form of hierarchy. I just don't have one at hand right now.
*) Yes, it's fuzzy. We're doing proper software development here. :-P
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So, if there were a dutch group, the dutch wiki pages would go into that group, right?
Wouldn't it be nice to have something like country flags on the top for all languages, in which the pages exist. The language could be kept for the next pages, you enter, if the language does not exist, it could display the english version... So to switch the wiki to another language with english as backup strategy.. -
Alexandra, would it be possible to add a kind of "language dimension" to the wiki at all?
This way, a page would exist only once, but in different languages. Anyone who would be willing would just have to hit a "translate this page" button and go on. Also, if the original page (english I would suggest), changes, all the translated pages could be marked as "dirty".
Just some random thoughts, don't shoot me if it's too complicated to implement or goes too much into a Web CMS direction :-)
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I think a wiki per language could be fine.
[quote author="Alexandra Leisse" date="1291910019"]
Other than that, it probably makes sense to come up with some sane form of hierarchy. I just don't have one at hand right now.[/quote]Wiki is always a bit anti-hierarchical :)
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I personally think, Volkers idea is somewhat as my suggestion and would be much better than one wiki per language. Especially as the main (perhaps English) would always be present and the translations are optional. and you will not have the different languages got different directions (not too much :-) ).
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Translations on the wikis I've seen (the KDE ones) are always a pain, and never seems to be possible to find a good solution. Even if groups really rocks our world, what about tags? Should tags be translated too? If not, when one person looks at all the results of the tag "foobar", then all pages of all languages are found, which is always complicated.
IMVHO, the only sane approach is having completely separated wikis, like wikimedia does. MediaWiki also has a nice feature (namespaces) that helps a lot there, but still has the problem of the categories (in MediaWiki are very similar to the tags, as categories are created when somebody adds a category to a page).
BTW, I suppose integrating the devnet with a third-party wiki like mediawiki is plain impossible/unrealistic, isn't it?
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Supposing the tags will be translated in some point in the future:
Does the DevNet platform supports tags translation (or a mechanism of "making different strings equivalent")?
For example:
English(tag A) == Portuguese(tag A) == Spanish(tag A) == ...
So we don't have to add a new tag to translate one already existent (what would multiply the number of tags per page/post by a huge number :-P).
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My 2 cents:
The intenacionalization must be a built in feature in the wiki, not a woraround with category, page titles or tags.
Every creation of a page the author select the language of then, and the wiki store the information of the language and what translations are created.
Then, the header automatcly show the already tranlated versions and a option <<Translate to: [list of untranslated languages]>>.
With the dates of edit is possible show a warning of outdated pages too.The url pattern for the transated pages must follow thepattern of groups <<:Xx:Group:SubGroup::Article>>.
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[quote author="Cochise" date="1291944060"]My 2 cents:
The intenacionalization must be a built in feature in the wiki, not a woraround with category, page titles or tags.
Every creation of a page the author select the language of then, and the wiki store the information of the language and what translations are created.
Then, the header automatcly show the already tranlated versions and a option <<Translate to: [list of untranslated languages]>>.
With the dates of edit is possible show a warning of outdated pages too.The url pattern for the transated pages must follow thepattern of groups <<:Xx:Group:SubGroup::Article>>.[/quote]
This sounds good. But which automatism can decide when articles up to the language are the same?
(apart from the point that the realisation of technical solutions is time consuming)The WikiWay suggests "'The Simplest Thing that Could Possible Work'":http://www.artima.com/intv/simplest.html .
It's hard to get the complete requirements for a thing, that is not even be in use somewhere: I don't know any wiki engine that provides this feature and - therefore - no community that actually benifits from such a feature.
Please don't misunderstand me. I love great software. And the devnet wiki engine is of sure far from this. But I think, the more built-in features a wiki engine has, the more the creativity will be restricted to build (new) concepts for organizing information.
...I'm afraid my writing abilities are far from the convincing power of my minds (on me;)). -
This is a highly interesting thread. Plenty of good (and valid) points. :)
In an ideal world we would just build the ideal solution. Unfortunately, we're not quite there yet. We will discuss within the team what is actually feasible to implement and how we can solve the current issues with the wiki.
Meanwhile, keep your suggestions coming. We're listening. :)
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the "kde userbase":http://userbase.kde.org/ is a great internacionalizated wiki. It has a "built in translation system":http://userbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Special:LanguageStats&code=ar where versions for any language is expected for any page and informations about translation states are tracked.
I don't know how is imoplemented, but is with media wiki and i don't find the wiki in "projects":https://projects.kde.org
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Wait, isn't DevNet written in Qt - isn't this what tr() is for? :) :)
Conceptually I like the idea of the "parallel wikiverse" that was proposed, but I'm not sure how to handle the "gaps" where pages haven't (yet) been translated.
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[quote author="Cochise" date="1292007718"]the "kde userbase":http://userbase.kde.org/ is a great internacionalizated wiki. It has a "built in translation system":http://userbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Special:LanguageStats&code=ar where versions for any language is expected for any page and informations about translation states are tracked.[/quote]
The problem with KDE's Userbase is the "duplicated results in searches":http://userbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Special:Search&redirs=0&search=akonadi&fulltext=Search&ns0=1. You can't use search conveniently, since you are fooled by all the false positives you get from other languages.
[quote]I don't know how is imoplemented, but is with media wiki and i don't find the wiki in "projects":https://projects.kde.org[/quote]
Probably is a extension developed by a third party. Check the "version page":http://userbase.kde.org/Special:Version for the list of installed extensions.