User talk:SomeHuman
Notes on List of rides page
Moved to the page's Discussion page, as the discussion is in particular relevant for that single page and may concern its other editors and readers as well.
SomeHuman 2009-01-04 07:35 / 08:09 (GMT)
Brussels
Thanks for your concern about the Brussels pages. It's late, so I'm finding it difficult to work through all that you've written.<br?>
I guess this entry should really be moved to Talk:Brussels when you've read it, and the weird redirect issue has been sorted out!
Nsayers 22:30, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
Main part of above comment moved to the Brussels' discussion page — SomeHuman 2010-03-02 23:43
Multilingual solutions
Hi SomeHuman. I'd like to work out a good way to handle the obvious need for multiple languages on the WNBR wiki. At the moment, the following solutions are being used, with the assumption that the main language is English:
- Write the whole page in the non-English language (eg: Saint Petersburg) – drawback: no other language option/s
- Add my 'Babelfish translation link' template to such pages – drawback: hacky, computer-generated translation not very good
- Write the same page with multiple languages (eg: Brussels) – drawback: messy, cluttered pages with too much text for single-language readers
- Write separate, translated page/s tagged with the language code (eg: Cardiff/Cy:Caerdydd) – drawback: finicky titling, not properly semantic within the wiki structure, difficult to maintain translations.
I've looked, briefly, at the following solution, which looks good:
Got any thoughts on this? I'm tempted to install this extension and run with it. The current approaches we're using (and that you've recently applied to, eg, Paris and Lille) aren't really sustainable.
--Nsayers 23:50, 7 March 2010 (UTC)
- The principle is quite sound, Nick. There are however, at first sight, three catches:
- In January, my Template_talk:Stub#Multilingual version comment already mentioned that we do not seem to have decision making facilities on this wiki. That template's source contains inline-commented pseudo-code for the decision-making. The Mediawiki solution that you propose does basically what I explained. But it uses the language argument with the corresponding text, for several languages in a page, and lets user settings instead of a language argument decide what to show - a very interesting approach that might allow maintaining bi- and multilingual pages. For a template like 'Stub' with predefined text in a sufficient number of languages, no argument would be needed to show only one language. The Wikimedia solution must prerequisite (at least) basic programming facilities to allow its decision-making.
- One has no overview: To practically maintain pages in several languages, one must be able to see the different language versions at the same time. At least in theory, that problem could be solved by a user setting override that would tell the Wikimedia style template (as well as my style templates for specific purposes) to show all availabe languages instead of one. This might be extremely easy, or more tricky - I did not yet study the Wikimedia solution's source code.
- The Wikimedia solution shows it is a beta version, and it was last updated in 2006... I would think that if it had worked as intended, it would no longer be a beta. And neither its author nor anyone else seems interested or able to attend to whatever the problem(s) might be. It might be just a minor glitch that has little relevance on our simple wiki, but more serious consequences on larger scale complex wikis (e.g. incompatibility with other, often intricate, templates, or with other solutions for similar problems that are in use).
- Anyway, this wiki desparately needs a decision-making facility. Your 'Next ride' template for instance, needs to become multilingual to avoid page-by-page simulations of its output. One might have a single multilingual template for the 'standard' titles, which would appear to an editor like {{Title|Links|fr,en}} to show "Liens / Links", or elsewhere {{Title|History|nl}} to show "Historiek", on the pages.
- In case user setting would become determining (with or without the Mediawiki solution code), if showing a single language suffices, even simpler {{Title|Links}} and {{Title|History}} would produce the titles in the reader's language, even if the rest of the page would be in another language (including with Wikimedia solution wherever the reader's language is unavailable). I assume people can accept that 'anomaly' pretty well.
- SomeHuman 2010-03-08 06:32-07:04
