Wikipedia talk:Multilingual coordination/Archive 1

Wikipedia talk:Multilingual coordination : Archived talk (dec 01-jun 02)

Why the link to the polish wikipedia with some content and action has been replaced by the link to the http://pl.wikipedia.com/ without any content?

I think that polish wikipedia would be better served by the site which is fully polonized, and for which somebody cares. This seems not to be the case for http://pl.wikipedia.com/

Pawel Jochym

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?
 * 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  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. ), 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

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  work fine, but URLs in the form   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  (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


 * Apparently, since it's illegal, browsers may interpret differently.. For example, they may fetch the page with ...Kurt_Gödel, ...Kurt_G%F6del or even ...Kurt_G%C3%B6del (In UTF-8 encoding with URL percent encoding).  The latter is the most weird, and hardest to handle, so it would be wise to encode the URL the way you want them seen... --Chexum

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

The links on the German Wikipedia still don't work:-( WojPob

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

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 -- This would be the French version, but it needs a little work before it is of final quality.

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Could people from different national pedias provide some info about state-of-their-pedias ? How many articles they have, what are their plans etc. --Taw

OK, Taw, here is the situation of the Dutch Wikipedia: A search with a "," currently gives some 360 articles, a dot gives 487 pages. I wonder how to KEEP the editors. Many have hopped in, contributed a little, and left. I have reason to think, though I cannot prove it, that we 'loose' most of the initial contributers to the English Wikipedia. The average number of authors working on it together in the same period has remained 4-5. I agree with Larry's assumption that 5-10 would be the minimum to speed it up and to have some sense of community. Anyway, the necessary translation have almost been done, except for the terms RecentChanges and HomePage. As far as I'm concerned we need a 'Dutch' logo with at least the word 'Wikipedia' in it (anyone?). I'd personally prefer a little more colour, like for instance a backgrond colour on the top bars. Plus, we too are trying to figure out how the links with special characters work out. As for 'our plans', internal consistency and inter-Wiki-policy, we cannot begin to discuss those issues on the Dutch site until we have a larger and more consistent amount of contributors who are willing to take some responsibility. Finally, I'm not sure whether to post these questions here or on the Intlwiki-l list, but I'd like to know for instance how other Inl.Wikipedia's get/keep/loose their authors, and any other experiences in building and editing their 'pedia's. --TK

I just took a look at nearly every non-English Wikipedia. Three observations may be of help to anyone willing to get one off the ground: --TK (Dutch Wikipedia)
 * 1) Every Wikipedia that goes well has enough basic information about Wikipedia/WikiWiki/editing pages/how to contribute/HTML-codes/how to entitle pages etc. translated so that newcomers easily learn how to contribute.
 * 2) Every Wikipedia running well has at least one person doing the pushing, who continues to put in new entries so the RecentChanges page looks alive! Once it looks dead, it will stay dead.
 * 3) The HomePage looks up-dated, and the links in the titlebars have been translated, too.

Please send translations to jasonr at bomis.com--he doesn't read this page often! -

About the numbers for Spanish wikipedia. I don't know if is it correct to include the "Sevilla Server". Even when all of them got there passing through wikipedia, and the purpose is identical, they do not use the name "wikipedia", nor seem interested in having any conection with the project. I do not know if Jimbo has continued talking to them, but after a while I think they should stop being mentioned in advance report, except maybe as a comparison to the spanish wikipedia (that I think will not grow much more while the sevilla enciclopedia lasts, and that could well be forever).

Because there is no living Spanish Wikipedia now, but there is a projects that comes directly from it, I'm statsing this project, not virtually dead Spanish Wikipedia. They have almost identical rules as all Wikipedias, so it's not true that they have nothing in common. --User:Taw