Intro - some thought about the wiki translations

[Ferenc Veres]

Hi,

First, I agree with reducing navigation boxes on left from 3 to 2. I 
never used the third yet.

Frank W. Kooistra írta, 2008-09-02 23:45 keltezéssel:
> A later mail of you ( Re: Deleting outdated/unused pages of 17:41) actually 
> came with several suggestions. Point five and six looked the most appealing 
> to me. I cannot fully comprehend yet if and how point 5 : each language gets 
> its own namespace,  will solve the translation issue . I will look into that.

I don't know how the namespaces stuff would work, but if it works good, 
then cool. For me any solution is ok. What we did on this so far was 
what general wiki editors could do; we cannot install new instances, we 
cannot make namespaces. (And translations were already there.)

We had some solutions to manually maintaining the links to the 
translated articles from the translated articles (to avoid the jump to 
the English one, as you mentioned). The thread is here (I am not sure we 
found a really good solution):

(Archived threads are broken, please search for "German subdomain".)
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/documentation/2008-July/thread.html
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/documentation/2008-August/thread.html

Summary: you can link to translation directly, but you must manually 
update links to pages what you translate. The "what links here" option 
helps a lot, because you can easily find which /de pages link to the 
English one and update them.

About category translations:

This we discussed under subject "Translations and their categories" in 
August. (same link)

This solution allows navigating the categories in whatever language you 
use, and switching to English any time to see whether there are more 
articles in English than in German. Example:

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Category:Om_2008.8/de
click English
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Category:Om_2008.8
click Distributions (page bottom)
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Category:Distributions
back to German:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Category:Distributions/de

(So far these category navigation pages are quite hidden from users, 
people navigates by links in the articles I think.)

 From latest self-tests, I think LANGUAGE box should be on the beginning 
of the article everywhere. As you can see, people keeps on landing on 
English pages due to the not updated links, and they read the whole 
English page before they find the Language switch. :-)

Regards,
Ferenc