[Mageia-i18n] [proposition] Using Translate extension on Mageia wiki

Tue Oct 18 18:59:27 CEST 2011

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 13:31, Oliver Burger <oliver.bgr at googlemail.com> wrote:
+> Am Dienstag, 18. Oktober 2011, 13:11:33 schrieb Romain d'Alverny:
+>> On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 20:27, Yuri Chornoivan <yurchor at ukr.net> wrote:
+>> > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate
+>> >
+>> > This extension can significantly ease up maintenance of the translations
+>> > with no additional efforts to sync translations with original (automatic
+>> > synchronization).
+>>
+>> Actually, we didn't plan to manage l10n that way, but by having
+>> distinct wiki instances per locale (wiki.mageia.org/en/,
+>> wiki.mageia.org/fr/ and so on) and interwiki-link them. The same way
+>> Wikipedia does it actually (and we used to at MDV as well).
+>>
+>> So using this extension means a significant change in how we lay things out.
+>
+> Since I was away for a few days and had to do some presentation yesterday, I
+> only now could look into this.
+>
+> Please correct me, if I'm wrong!
+> If I understand this correctly, it wil kind of force syncronization between
+> the en wiki and the others.
+
+As I understand it, it gives translation progress stats between
+locales and allows to translate chunks by chunks (so it's a 1-1
+translation, with less freedom for a given locale to do things a bit
+differently - for good and for bad).
+
+> As I said in last i18n meeting as well as in doc team, I'd like to keep the
+> more important things like
+> - really important documentation
+> - errata
+> - information about the project
+> - ...
+> in sync.
+
+That's clearly a nice feat; does it do it really with this extension?
+Couldn't this be done as well with a watchdog script on a given set of
+defined pages, which reports is fed into i18n web page or ml? (or even
+use mediawiki page watch feature directly).
+
+> But I do see fields in which a dezentralization is important as well,
+> e.g. planning an event can be done very nicely using a wiki (like we did for
+> FOSDEM 2011 or MandrivaUser.de does for some time.
+
+Well, decoupling is not always best, but it helps
+
+Here are issues I see with the extensions:
+ - non-localized URLs (instead of w.m.o/en/Home and w.m.o/fr/Accueil
+(ie, localized title _in_ the URL), we would have w.m.o/Home and
+w.m.o/Home/fr (English title in the URL); that's not blocking, but
+that's not so good either;
+ - inconsistent navigation in a chosen locale (tested on the KDE Userbase wiki):
+   - my browser accepts French as a primary language, so content is
+returned to me in French;
+   - I decide to look at the Spanish version of a page; fine, it
+works; my intent is to navigate the Spanish-speaking pages now;
+   - clicking on another wiki link will forward me to the default URL,
+that will be rewritten in French => back to French, where I would have
+expected Spanish;
+   - right, digging into this, this is because those links are
+prefixed such as: "Special:myLanguage/Applications" which rewrites to
+Applications/fr
+ - we didn't plan to setup the wiki that way *, and that's a
+significant change, so either that is really important for you and it
+has to be considered _now_, or it can be done differently with the
+planned wiki setup.
+
+* expected wiki setup is:
+ - http://wiki.mageia.org/en/
+ - http://wiki.mageia.org/fr/
+... and so on, with locale aware interwiki links (the way Wikipedia
+does it). It certainly has drawbacks too. But the point is that things
+get done in the end.
+
+Romain
+