Personally i've seen all the trouble that commons goes through to be multilingual (from the outside anyways; the commoners can coment better then me), and it seems to be a lot of effort (even from a simple prespective of should the welcome message be in english or french). -- - Bawolff Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 6:59 PM, gopher65 <[email protected]> wrote: > You know, I've actually been recently considering an idea for combining all > of the Wikinews language editions into a single project. However, the code > required to accomplish this in a reasonable fashion does not currently > exist, and I don't think that anyone at the foundation would be willing to > jump in and volunteer the significant amount of dev time that would be > necessary to make such a project possible from a technical perspective... > even though I can see Wikipedia benefiting immensely from the same tech. > > Imagine going onto a single, non-language specific Wikipedia, simply > selecting your language from a list, and having every major article appear > in your selected language. You switch to another language, the same article > appears, with the same text, merely having been translated by users. > Translation is MUCH easier than writing a Featured Article quality article > from scratch (FA articles take a surprising amount of effort and time to > write), so this would significantly decrease the current duplication of > effort that is taking place in the "separate but equal" multiple-languages > version of the mediawiki software that we currently use. In such a model of > Wikipedia much more emphasis would be placed on the translation of other > language's articles into every language than is currently the case. (For > instance, a while ago I was looking up some special type of Russian Perogie. > The article I wanted doesn't exist on English Wikipedia, but it does exist > on Russian Wikipedia... which was useless to me, because I don't speak > Russian. Thankfully Google Translate came to the rescue... sorta.) ;-) > > Back to Wikinews and the issue at hand. As a Wikinews specific example of > how this could eventually work: you have an article about something that > happened in France, investigated by French Wikinewies, originally written in > French, and then translated into Dutch, English, German, and Mandarin by > other Wikinewsies. That type of coordination is currently *possible*, but > it's much more difficult to manage than it would be in a better designed, > multi-frontpage, auto-language selection multi-lingual site (based on your > preferences for logged in users, or a per-visit dropdown language selection > system (for non-logged in users)). Right now if you try to do that kind of > thing you're attempting to coordinate 20 different people spread across 10 > different sites; it's nigh-on impossible in practice, unfortunately. > > Because of the technical issues that would need to be addressed, at the > present time I'd have to say that a multi-lingual version of Wikinews simply > isn't practical. Combining the efforts of Wikinewies everywhere and reducing > our duplication of effort via translation of locally investigated and > written articles would be a great idea, but it's not something that will > happen soon. That's something for the far future (10 or 15 years from now > maybe), not for the immediate future. Wikinews as a whole has bigger things > to worry about than that, for the moment. > > Maybe though, Wikipedia doesn't? > > Gopher65 > > -------------------------------------------------- > From: "Milos Rancic" <[email protected]> > Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2010 11:32 AM > To: "Wikinews mailing list" <[email protected]>; "Wikimedia > Foundation Mailing List" <[email protected]> > Subject: [Wikinews-l] Discussion about proposal for multilingual Wikinews > >> I am cleaning Requests for new languages [1] at Meta. Some of the >> requests are clearly out of the Language committee scope, and they >> need wider discussion for concluding them. >> >> One of such requests is for multilingual Wikinews [2]. Please, discuss >> here (at foundation-l; I am sending this message to wikinews-l to poke >> those who are not at foundation-l) or on wiki at the page [2]. >> >> [1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages >> [2] - >> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikinews_multilingual >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikinews-l mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l >> > > _______________________________________________ > Wikinews-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l > _______________________________________________ Wikinews-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
