Languages - taking steps
I attended a Sanitation Conference in Jakarta today (and am going back tomorrow) and was very encouraged by the response I had when I told people about Appropedia. A lot of people seemed keen to share their information. I've only been through one small part of the exhibition outside the conference hall, but I've already met a bunch of people from organizations that have good Indonesian language material (some with English language publications as well). These are just initial contacts, but it's very encouraging.
This has got me more excited about languages. I'd like to get support for languages going very soon. Indonesian/Malay and Spanish are the obvious ones to start with.
What's the latest thinking on subdomains, subsites (by which I mean /en /es etc, like Wikitravel) or using the single site? I put my argument via email for not using a single site; however there are probably other concerns I haven't understood, and that we need to think about. E.g. I'm thinking of Lonny's comment on the Appropedia Roundtable (podcast) Part II
, about integrating the different language communities. I wonder if we can meet Lonny's hopes (which I share) for the multilingual nature of the site through making a search that returns hits in more than one language?
- Languages other than the focus wiki could be listed further down the page, or on another tab. Or a link might be provided saying, e.g. "This search also gives 6 results in Indonesian and 8 results in Spanish."
** The search might also extract interlanguage links from the search hit pages, so below each hit there might be links to "Indonesian/Malay version" and "Spanish version". Not sure if this is valuable or necessary - the links will be available from the page itself anyway, and this won't turn up any pages that don't have equivalents in the focus wiki.
Hello, I am just too new in
Hello, I am just too new in this community, so I don't know how many people participate. But out of my experience in several Spanish speaking Wikimedia projects, I wouldn't advice you to create subdomains for new language communities as long as you don't count with a stabile group of contributors.
Until that critical group has been achieved, I think they should be allowed to contribute in their own language in the main domain. Multilingual communities work well in a single domain as you see in commons.wikimedia.org. But a subdomain with only 2 or 3 new contributors have many chances to get abandoned, becoming victim of the spam.
Okay, fair enough... I guess
Okay, fair enough... I guess we need some level of commitment before going to a separate domain, at least one or two very active users, including at least one acting as an admin, and a larger group of occasional contributors.
So for now, I'm okay with doing it on a single site, but seeing this as a temporary thing (if anyone has other ideas, please say!) We can create alternative language main pages, and link them from the English main page, with instructions on navigating in that language.
-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
Post new comment