many thanks for this proposal, erik! what i would love to be considered in this context as well would be "native language". to give an example:
i am speaking english and german. therefor i like to read the contents in the original version, as long as it is available in this language. e.g. wmch s bylaws are in 5 languages, the authoritative version is german as it is registered in zürich. most other texts on our wiki are written in english. so i d love to get these pages in english, and the bylaws in german. rupert Am 24.04.2013 05:30 schrieb "Erik Moeller" <e...@wikimedia.org>: > Hi folks, > > I'd like to start a broader conversation about language support in MW > core, and the potential need to re-think some pretty fundamental > design decisions in MediaWiki if we want to move past the point of > diminishing returns in some language-related improvements. > > In a nutshell, is it time to make MW aware of multiple content > languages in a single wiki? If so, how would we go about it? > > Hypothesis: Because support for multiple languages existing in a > single wiki is mostly handled through JS hacks, templates, and manual > markup added to the content (such as <div>s indicating language > direction), we are providing an opaque, confusing and often > inconsistent user experience in our multilingual wikis, which is a > major impediment for growth of non-English content in those wikis, and > participation by contributors who are not English speakers. > > Categories have long been called out as one of the biggest factors, > and they certainly are (since Commons categories are largely in > English, they are by definition excluding folks who don't speak the > language), but I'd like to focus on the non-category parts of the > problem for the purposes of this conversation. > > Support for the hypothesis (please correct misconceptions or errors): > > 1) There's no consistent method by which multiple language editions of > the same page are surfaced for selection by the use. Different wikis > use different templates (often multiple variants and layouts in a > single wiki), different positioning, different rules, etc., leading to > inconsistent user experience. Consistency is offered by language > headers generated by the Translate extension, but these are used for > managing translations, while multilingual content existing in the same > wiki may often not take the form of 1:1 translations. > > Moreover, language headers have to be manually updated/maintained, > consider the user-friendliness of something like the +/- link in the > language header on a page like > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Kooperationen > which leads to: > > https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Lang-Partnerships&action=edit > > Chances are that a lot of people who'd have the ability to provide a > version (not necessarily a translation) of the page in a given > language will give up even on the process of doing so correctly. > > 2) There's no consistent method by which page name conflicts (which > may often occur in similar languages) are resolved, and users have to > manually disambiguate. > > 3) There are basic UX issues in the language selection tools offered > today. For example, after changing the language on Commons to German, > I will see the page I'm on (say English) with a German user interface, > even if there's an actual German content version of the page > available. This is because these language selection tools have no > awareness of the existence of content in relevant languages. > > 4) In order to ensure that content is rendered correctly irrespective > of the UI language set, we require content authors to manually add > <div>s around RTL content, even if that's all the page contains. > > 5) It's impossible to restrict searches to a specific language. It's > impossible to restrict recent changes and similar tools to a specific > language. > > I'll stop there - I'm sure you can think of other issues with the > current approach. For third party users, the effort of replicating > something like the semi-acceptable Commons or Meta user experience is > pretty significant, as well, due to the large number of templates and > local hacks employed. > > This is a very tricky set of architectural issues to solve well, and > it would be easy to make the user experience worse by solving it > poorly. Still, as we grow our bench strength to take on hard problems, > I want to raise the temperature of this problem a bit again, > especially from the standpoint of future platform engineering > improvements. > > Would it make sense to add a language property to pages, so it can be > used to solve a lot of the above issues, and provide appropriate and > consistent user experience built on them? (Keeping in mind that some > pages would be multilingual and would need to be identified as such.) > If so, this seems like a major architectural undertaking that should > only be taken on as a partnership between domain experts (site and > platform architecture, language engineering, Visual Editor/Parsoid, > etc.). > > I'm not suggesting this should be done in the very near term, but I'd > like to at least start talking about it, hear if I'm completely off > base (and if there are simpler ways to improve on current state), and > explore where it could fit in our longer term agenda. > > Relevant existing code: > > * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate - awesome for > page and message translation, but I'm not clear that it can help for > the other multilingual content scenarios and problems > > * Others: > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Internationalization_extensions > > Thanks, > Erik > > -- > Erik Möller > VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation > > Wikipedia and our other projects reach more than 500 million people every > month. The world population is estimated to be >7 billion. Still a long > way to go. Support us. Join us. Share: https://wikimediafoundation.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
