I'd like to see some experimentation with multiple languages on the Pirates Glossary.

The way Wikipedia does it is having independent interlinked wikis, and showing the interlinks on the sidebar. Looks like MediaWiki mechanism for adding stuff to the sidebar in this way is made for multiple languages.

I found other methods. There is an extension to put multiple languages on a single page. There is another to redirect depending on the language (makes Page redirect to Page/en or Page/de depending on the user language). And there's probably others.

When the official BOINC wiki had just appeared, there was already an offer for translation, even though most pages weren't even migrated yet. Considering there are many methods to handle multilanguage mediawikis, the Pirate glossary seems a good place to play with them, and see which is the most appropriate.

But of course, doing English and German or similar would be boooooooring. We need to do English and Pirate. And maybe Pig latin too.

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Considering there are many methods to handle multilanguage mediawikis, the Pirate glossary seems a good place to play with them, and see which is the most appropriate.

One thing which should be done to test the wiki software is to upgrade the Pirates glossary to MediaWiki 1.11 (or even 1.12) and verify that the BOINC authentication extension still works. (Or modify it so that it does.) Then we can ask that the new MediaWiki at Berkeley use it, so that existing accounts on the dev forums give you an account on the wiki.

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

The "simple" way that wikipedia works is to have multiple wikis in different languages, a "family" of wikis, and then cross link to them. I'd like to avoid having to set up multiple wikis like this, though it's actually not to difficult to do so.

I like the "Polyglot" extension, which supports having alternate pages in different languages, but within the same wiki. The extension page says that it's still "experimental". And that it doesn't work with templates, so you also need to use the "Multilang" extension for the templates. Or perhaps a combination of the two. I agree we should install these and try them out.

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

I do want to try these various methods of supporting multiple languages, once I have time to update this wiki to MediaWiki 1.12. But I've also found another way to get translations, using Google Translations. This is already in use on the wiki at SugarLabs (http://www.SugarLabs.org). I tried borrowing this here, and it seems to work, though it needs clean-up. See the page [[Help:Contents]] for the example.

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats