Internationalisation (i18n)

[almereyda]

Coming from a language-diverse community of pattern language and federated wiki enthusiast, we bring the requirement of internationalisation.

As a reader and writer within the wiki federation, I need it to support specifics to my local language culture, in order to preserve cultural diversity and accessibility.

Here we ponder about the points to consider for farming internationalised wikis.

We might begin with ideas about initial translation of the user interface, and coould continue with deeper implications of true internationalisation (i18n), e.g. about URL sanitisation.

This is best done on examples with concrete needs.

[almereyda]

My example is the wiki farm on the pattern language of commoning, published in Federated Wikis at:

• http://mustersprache.commoning.wiki/
• http://patternlanguage.commoning.wiki/

There are a few language editions coming up next (French, Spanish, Greek, ...), which we would like to accommodate equally:

• http://editions.commoning.wiki/

[WardCunningham]

This is work that is long overdue. I am not likely to lead this work but will be happy to join as a supporting member. I'm sure most of our regular contributors feel likewise.

We should aspire to make the federated experience work well for any language with a sustaining community. We should also look for solutions that do not get in the way of collaboration between multi-lingual authors. When you say, "farming internationalized wikis", you may be suggesting the same thing.

[paul90]

I expect that Internationalisation will touch on many part of wiki, those that spring to mind include:

• Domain names -> file system directory names for storing a wiki, and site in the URL path.
• Page Titles -> to page name in URL, and filename to store the page.
• Default Pages -> localised versions of 'Welcome Visitors' and supporting pages.
• Plugin Pages -> shown from ctrl/cmd + i as well as via links.

I suspect there will also be a need to provide a link back from a translated page to the original.

Most will require support adding into the core of wiki, but the last two are will require community.

I've almost certainly missed something, but it's a start.

[replaid]

For the use case I described in fedwiki/wiki-client#103 (comment) (the conversation that led to this issue being created), the ability to use non-Latin characters in page titles is an order of magnitude more important than supporting IDN domain names or localization of default pages or plugin pages, so I opened #140 to explore that issue specifically. I'll comment on the others from the perspective of our use case later.

[dobbs]

@paul90, looking at fedwiki/wiki-client#103, I notice that I ended up implementing similar changes in fedwiki/wiki-client#271. But I notice that the former includes changes in recursiveGet that I did not implement in the latter. Is that an important oversight?

[paul90]

@dobbs, not too sure, but fedwiki/wiki-client#103 predates the siteAdapter. A lot of the code in this area has been through a number of changes since then.

[WardCunningham]

@replaid has explained in #140 that Russians want to speak Russian to each other.

[replaid]

@paul90 A fifth bullet point for your list would be localizing the user interface elements.

[replaid]

Related to pages and page titles, @WardCunningham I see you wrote long ago, "In my wildest dreams I'd like to be able to change Welcome Visitors to Bienvenue aux Visiteurs and have the slug stay welcome-visitors."

If that is still something you would desire, I would be very interested in your thoughts on how that would look and work. I am trying to gear up for conceptual work for handling a multilingual information space. Whatever thoughts have already been thunk would be very helpful guidance. I myself already face challenges of such an information space as I write this and am trying to use wiki to help, so I am motivated on this front much as I am with i18n of page titles.

[almereyda]

We have since released the French version of the pattern language and could indeed now make use of adapting the page title #140 or some kind of custom routing logic fedwiki/wiki-server#129 in the wiki (farm) configuration to select other primary pages than welcome-visitors.html.

• http://languedespatterns.commoning.wiki/

A crude hack could be to add a home/index.html file to the assets and have it perform an HTML redirect to the desired bienvenue-aux-visiteurs.html

Ward has also noted in the chat channel, that the welcome-visitors slug is the expected default page in many scripts, esp. around search, that parse the data present in the federation.