Translating the wiki
goob
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I've seen a request from a user to contribute Russian translations of the wiki in a comment on this post.
Are there thoughts to provide a mechanism for this?
It would be good to have wiki pages in users' native languages, but if translation is done manually there would be a lot of work each time a page in English is edited (and what if a page in another language is edited - does that feed back into English and other languages?). Version control would seem difficult.
There is a suggestion for having an FAQ directly within Diaspora on this discussions, but here I'm talking about the whole wiki text.
What are your thoughts?
goob Sat 3 Aug 2013 6:35PM
I would tend to agree with you, simply from a practical point of view. The wikis in other languages can be informed by the English one but not dictated by it, and improvements made in those languages can be fed back to the English and other ones as suggestions, no more.
Jason Robinson Sat 3 Aug 2013 8:55PM
I tend to agree with Jonne here. Wiki's are by nature always lagging behind anyway - I really see no purpose to translate to something that is likely to lag behind even more. Help pages yes, wiki no.
Help pages should be translated as they are targeted to normal users. Our wiki is for technical stuff - technical people need to understand a lot of English anyway to get around, especially in the programming world. There is a reason why programming languages are not translated either.
But of course if someone really feels they want to translate parts of the wiki, can't stop them can we :)
goob Sun 4 Aug 2013 10:01AM
The wiki contains pretty much all information now, Jason - non-technical as well as technical, including basic user guides and 'getting started' tips. I agree it's the non-technical information which is more useful to translate.
Waithamai Mon 12 Aug 2013 6:42PM
i like the way translations are implemented in http://theportalwiki.com
they simply add a subpage to the english version, for diaspora wiki it would be eg. https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/FAQ_for_users as the original page, https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/FAQ_for_users/de for a german version, /es for the spanish version etc.
one can easily add a box on top of the original page that shows all available translations.
the advantage over a seperate wiki for each language is, all the content stays in the same place, just on different levels. the english version will always be the main article, so it's not much harm if the translations are not as frequently updated as the english version.
and, of course, it won't cause any problems to add a new language, because no extra wiki is needed to add it.
the correct language pages will be found with the search field through content, although they still use the original english title.
Jonne Haß Mon 12 Aug 2013 6:48PM
I think there's no point in much further discussion. The first thing we need to decide is if we want translations in the wiki, if yes, how we implement them. I'll start a proposal for the first thing.
Poll Created Mon 12 Aug 2013 6:50PM
Allow non English content in the main wiki Closed Mon 19 Aug 2013 5:06PM
We want to allow non English content in the main wiki.
Without deciding on a particular form or rules, do we want non English content, not necessarily translated one, in the main wiki? If this proposal is rejected we're encouraging local communities to host their own wikis, giving out domains like de.wiki.diasporafoundation.org would not be rejected yet.
Results
| Results | Option | % of points | Voters | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Agree | 54.5% | 6 |
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| Abstain | 9.1% | 1 |
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| Disagree | 36.4% | 4 |
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| Block | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Undecided | 0% | 16 |
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11 of 27 people have participated (40%)
Jonne Haß
Mon 12 Aug 2013 6:52PM
I think international content in wikis often leads to clutter, and makes it harder for administrators to patrol the wiki and for everyone to follow the changes. A bad example for this is wiki.archlinux.org.
Waithamai
Mon 12 Aug 2013 6:53PM
at least for info pages, i don't think we need other languages for the technical stuff
Sean Tilley
Mon 12 Aug 2013 7:07PM
Currently on the fence about this. It'd be nice to have translations on our wiki, but clutter isn't ideal, and having whole other wikis on subdomains in different languages could cause problems in that docs get out of sync.
Jonne Haß · Sat 3 Aug 2013 5:50PM
I don't particular like translated wikis, it often leads to a mess, the translations usually significantly lack behind, not only, for the reasons you mentioned. I like the approach of maintaining independent wikis, not trying to mirror any content, a lot more. We can also talk about handing out subdomains like ru.wiki.diasporafoundation.org.