Multilingual Wiki for Users

[Viliam]

I started working on Slovak wiki pages for game users. If anyone thinks this is a good idea, and wants to do the same thing in another language, I would like to share some ideas.

Why Wiki? -- It can be written cooperatively. It is always up-to-date, and it can be used before it is finished. It can be improved incrementally; you can choose which parts are most important to you, and work on them first. It does not require you to check out a PO file, carefully scan the "fuzzy" strings over and over to see what has changed, then wait for the next release, then wait until someone makes the binaries, then tell your friends to download the newest version.

Off course the off-line manual has many advantages, especially for people without internet connection. But this can be easily solved later, for example by script which would download all wiki manual pages, and convert them to CHM format (or ZIPped HTML).

Page names should be localised; prefixed by language code in parentheses, followed by space, like this: "(xx) Xxxxx". (The language code prefix makes easier navigation in "Recent changes" wiki menu. It also prevents namespace conflicts for similar languages. With parentheses, the language code can be written in lower-case; as it should be. Space after makes the title easier to read.)

Pages should not become a "maze of hyperlinks". (This is not a Wikipedia with thousands of articles.) Pages should be only 1 or 2 clicks away from the main page (2 clicks for units, scenario walkthroughs, and WML commands; 1 click everything else). Therefore the main page should consist mostly of links.

The page creation should be decentralized. Not "English first, then translations", but rather "each language team writes their own pages, and can take inspiration from each other". The same pages in different languages should be cross-linked (like in Wikipedia), so that users speaking multiple languages can easily find additional information.

This is my idea of page structure (it is only an idea, each language team should decide the details independently)

About game (turn-based, non-deterministic)
- Game philosophy (KISS, we develop what we like to play)
- Free/libre software (in layman's terms, link to GNU GPL)
Getting ready
- Versions (newbie, you want to use the stable version!)
- Downloading (how to use Sourceforge)
- Installing
- Configuration
Rules
- Units
- Traits
- Abilities
- Terrain
- Strategies
Single player
- The Heir to the Throne (spoiler warning, walkthrough)
- ...etc...
- Unofficial campaigns
Multiplayer
Game development
- Creating units
- Creating maps
- Creating scenarios
Community
- Discussion forum
- Encyclopedia

(Please note that I try to use "non-computer peoples' language", without technical details, such as "Encyclopedia" instead of "Wiki". Of course, inside the pages, the technical details can and should be mentioned.)

Well, I hope someone will join...

[Viliam]

Think about wiki pages as if you were writing a paper manual. They should be possible to navigate using the "Previous" and "Next" links (it does not matter whether you actually implement these links or not; page order can be completely different in various languages). I am rather serious about making a script that will convert this to off-line manual, if many people will find this idea good... maybe a PDF version, too; and that one will need to have topics ordered linearly.

[Tux2B]

I could try... But you all know I am slow, because I have got a lot of things to do...

[Zagloj]

I want to help, but sometimes I have more or less time. But the point "each language team should decide the details independently", well what if I am the only one?, I know html, css, and of course, translate from English, I hope someone also join to the project.

[Viliam]

But the point "each language team should decide the details independently", well what if I am the only one?

This is supposed to mean that you should make the manual pages for your language as you consider them best. If you like the page structure of other languages, you may copy it, but you can also decide for a different structure. You can leave out (or simplify) information you consider less important (if you are the only person for your language, you probably will do it), but you can also add information specific for your language/region which would not exist in English manual, e.g. how to make accented characters work, or how to join localization team,... or maybe you can organize a Wesnoth competition in your country, and put info about it to the manual.

I just wanted to say that IMHO manuals for different languages do not have to look the same; they do not have to be verbatim translations. (I emphasise this, because as a translator of game, I am supposed to do verbatim translations of in-game tutorial instructions. But wiki is different.)

[lwa]

Page names should be localised; prefixed by language code in parentheses, followed by space, like this: "(xx) Xxxxx". (The language code prefix makes easier navigation in "Recent changes" wiki menu. It also prevents namespace conflicts for similar languages. With parentheses, the language code can be written in lower-case; as it should be. Space after makes the title easier to read.)

URL name must be ASCII. You can encounter encoding problem if you use 8 bit characters. Also, spaces in URL are a bad idea.
Why not use a simple templates like sk/foobar.html ?

[Viliam]

URL name must be ASCII. You can encounter encoding problem if you use 8 bit characters. Also, spaces in URL are a bad idea.

MediaWiki (the software used in Wesnoth wiki) handles this; the URL of the page is not exactly the title of the page... spaces are converted to underlines, and non-ASCII characters are converted to UTF-8 sequences which are then converted to "%xx" encoding... So, at the end, the URL contains only ASCII characters.

For example, if the name of page is "(sk) Návod", the URL is:
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/%28sk%29_N%C3%A1vod

This is not very nice, but users usually do not type URLs manually, so this is not a big problem; the wiki page title looks nice, and when you hold mouse cursor above the hyperlink, the "%xx" encoded letters are displayed correctly in the Firefox status bar. (The Wikipedia works this way too.)

[lwa]

The title is the URL name ? That's bad.

I think the encoding information can be lost if you mail or copy paste the link from here and there. At least put a index, main page, redirector in plain ASCII to help people to retrieve the site with a non slovak keyboard layout.

[Viliam]

URL is automatically generated from title name (using the algorithm I have described), which means that URL always contains only ASCII characters (even if the page title contains non-ASCII characters).

See example:
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/%28sk%29_N%C3%A1vod
It contains only ASCII characters, therefore no information is lost on copying, and you can type it on non-Slovak keyboards. (However, if with Firefox you put mouse cursor above the URL, non-ASCII characters are displayed in the status bar, making it legible. And if you click the link, the page title contains non-ASCII characters.)

Anyway: This encoding system is how MediaWiki software works -- it is not a part of my proposal. This is how all non-English Wikipedias work. (Well, also English Wikipedia, if some article title contains accented letters.) I suggest playing a bit with non-English Wikipedias to get an experience of how it works; my explanations are probably a bit confused, sorry for this, but the system works, really.

[lwa]

If the wiki engine display ASCII strings as URL, that's ok.

Here is some remaining misfits:

- The language is said as english in the <html> tag.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="ltr">

- Also in the Content-Language in HTTP return. It may confuse some browser and most of the robots.

- The <div id="nav"> header is still in english

- You need to know a little english to be able to edit a document or to create a editor account.

None are blocking, anyway.

[Viliam]

Well, nothing is perfect.

If there will ever be a better system, all we need is copy+paste the text from the old one. Until then, let's do the best we can.

The "little english to be able to edit a document or to create a editor account" should IMHO also be explained in the localized manual.

I guess these problems are impossible to solve using the current wiki software -- it was not designed to support multiple languages in single installation. But IMHO until the localized manuals are really written, no one is going to change it. So let's not spend more time writing about manuals then writing the manuals...

(One possible solution would be to install more mediawiki instances; one for each language. But this would require some work... more than was spent writing the localized manuals... and it is not sure how many people would use it anyway.)

[ILikeProgramming]

I don't mind doing something for Russian.

[toms]

Please, translate the `create´ wiki-pages! I need it! (and others too, probably)