UFOpaedia talk:Community portal

How to translate properly?

How to translate a page on this wiki and to have 2 versions of one page (one in English and one in Russian) which will be linked together by language selection at the left side? I did not find how to do this in Help section. Tried on Strength and its Russian translation Сила.

I've done a little bit of reading into this matter, and the problem is that the Mediawiki software doesn't have multi-lingual support built in, and it's very complicated to set up. It might even require creating separate wikis for all the languages.

The easiest solution I've seen so far unfortunately requires that all the article names are written in the same language (in this case, English), but with a language identifier /fr, /ru, etc after the name. For example, Strength/ru. To connect the various languages together, a simple template is created which you put at the top of each page that generates the links to all the languages. That is by far the simplest option there is at the moment. However I don't think that it is the most desirable solution since I think you want the links to be in your native language.

An alternative to that solution is to manually link the articles together, which would mean more work, but it would achieve the desired effect. -NKF 22:25, 8 January 2011 (EST)

I think that multi-lingual support is a must-have feature. After some local discussion here I think that indeed separate wikis must be created for each language (take en.wikipedia.org and ru.wikipedia.org for example). And that does not seem to be hard:

1. to create new MySQL database for each language (or to use the original base but add affixes like ru_, es_, fr_),
2. to configure empty Wikis to connect to that databases,
3. to configure InterWiki feature of each MediaWiki,
4. to move existing pages into empty Wikis,
5. to correct that pages so that they will point to other language versions,
6. to implement other small things (like appearance of Languages block to the left).

Who is in charge here? Maybe this work worth it? I myself can take the steps number 4 and 5 for Russian wiki.

And yes, user list will be unique for each separate wiki.

Fomka 15:03, 9 January 2011 (EST)

Pete is the person you need to get in touch with. I actually think it would be a very useful thing, especially for organizational purposes. However what worries me is what impact having 3, 4 or even 5 wikis will have on the server load. -NKF 00:05, 10 January 2011 (EST)

I just PM'd Fomka via StrategyCore but thought I'd post my thoughts here too. I think that Fomka's suggestion is the way to do it, despite it meaning that we essentially have two separate wikis. How I would suggest doing it is simply create a copy of this wiki at something like ru.ufopaedia.org but without the content (so basically a blank installation with the X-COM logo at the top-left) and let the Russian users translate it a page at a time.

I did think about making a copy of the content, but then you would have to have a copy of the user accounts as well for certain links to work, and you'd have a copy of the discussions in English as well and all in all it would be easier I think to start out with a blank site and go from there.

My only other concern was that if Russian users create a new page then perhaps some moderators from that wiki should translate the page to English as well. I know that's a bit crappy, as the Russian users would have to translate any new English pages to the Russian site as well, so they get double the workload, but I'm assuming that a lot of people here can't translate their content into Russian.

What do you think? It would be easy enough to set up. --Pete 08:22, 23 July 2011 (EDT)

I think that the blank installation is good. The first thing to be posted is the rule "translate new Russian pages into English" on the title page. I think there will be few such pages, because translating into Russian will take the priority for a long time. --Fomka 14:11, 23 July 2011 (EDT)