RE: Lua wiki content in other languages

["Nick Trout" <nick@...>]

> From: RLake@oxfam.org.pe [mailto:RLake@oxfam.org.pe]
> Sent: Monday, October 27, 2003 11:47 AM
> To: Lua list
> Subject: Re: Lua wiki content in other languages

How did you manage to respond before it arrived?! What are the lottery numbers?! Who's the winner in the 3.10 at Ascot? What am I having for lunch? Mmmm lunch...


> > I was wondering if anybody had any ideas or experience of mixed language
> > wikis/websites and how might be the best way to organise this. For
> > example, how might the wiki links work cross language?
> 
> The Lua wiki does not seem to have multilingual features enabled, but I
> remember from looking at the code which John Belmonte kindly shared with
> me some time ago that it is not difficult to enable. Without this, it is
> not possible to create WikiWords which include accented characters, for
> example (nor the Spanish ñ nor Portuguese ç). But I didn't have any
> trouble creating <http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaEnCastellano> ... although
> now that I have created it, I fear it may turn into a responsibility. :)
> 
> Wikis don't generally have any facility for automatically linking
> translations of pages, so that has to be done manually; more seriously,
> there is no way to ensure that translations stay up to date with changes.
> So I think the best thing would be to keep content separate, with
> cross-links as appropriate. Since it is not a particularly massive Wiki, I
> doubt whether anything more sophisticated would be necessary.

A separate wiki does seem to make sense since text searches probably won't make sense and the links will have to be duplicated for translated pages which sound like it could turn into a mess. I think Moin deals with multiple languages by having a different entry point (front page) for a users chosen language, but I don't think we have that feature. It's easy to link cross wiki with the otherwiki:PageName syntax as well. 

Mr Belmonte, what do you think?


> Personally, I would support the idea -- I'm not going to claim to be able
> to write Portuguese, but I can read it OK, and can help a bit.

Thanks Rici,
Nick