[okfn-help] Multilingual support for OKFN wiki site? (following Kat :)

Tue Feb 28 18:40:28 UTC 2012

Hi all!

I don't know the answer to Kat's email, but following her email, one
issue I've already raised on the usage of our wiki site at our IRC
channel and I'd like to hear your thoughts. I believe we could have a
lot of pages on wiki.okfn.org in multiple languages and I was
wondering what would be better. I see three possibilities, not
necessarily in this order of preference (for this I'd like to know
your opinion):

1. To use a template similar to this one
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Lang-mp>, so that we'd
have a box for each of these multilanguage pages, see this example
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/>. We can have the language for the wiki
set as the browser default, as it's done on Commons, or have the
default always in Engish, with a box at the bottom, such as this site
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/>

2. To use a MediaWiki extension which has a multiple language support
on its sidebar, as Wikipedia does (I suppose everybody here has used
it  :).

3. To use subpages. I've started using this here
<http://wiki.okfn.org/Projects/Textus/pt>, so we have on the top of
the page a link to <http://wiki.okfn.org/Projects/Textus>. I must
admit I don't like this solution very much. If we have only two
language, maybe we can use, such as this project I am coodinating
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_Brazil_programs/Education_program>,
but if we have too much languages, I dislike the subpage approach.

I'd prefer to have for this page <http://wiki.okfn.org/Rules> a
[[Regras]] article, instead of a [[Rules/pt]].

What do you think? Should we try a solution like 1.? I think there
will be a lot of content we can produce collaborativelly using OKFn
wiki site and having multiple language fot that will be necessary.

It's better ask before start doing in a bad way, because when we grow
more, it can be a pain to change to a better way. Thanks for any
opinions on this!

Tom

2012/2/28 Kat Braybrooke <kat.braybrooke at okfn.org>:
> Hi guys,
>
> As the OKFN becomes more international, we've been welcoming new regional
> groups and chapters to use our Wordpress blogfarm - and several of these
> have mentioned having problems applying non-Latin language characters to our
> sites. An example of such issues is on our Github here
> https://github.com/okfn/wordpress-theme-okfn/issues/14
>
> Charalmpos from the OKFN:LOCAL Greece group (CC'd here) has recommended that
> we use a paid plug-in like http://wpml.org which makes it easy to work with
> multilingual sites (and has 40 language options). The only problem with this
> is that it's proprietary, which we all have qualms about.
>
> There are other options here
> https://codex.wordpress.org/Multilingual_WordPress (thanks Rufus) but I'm
> not sure which one would be best. Does anyone else have experience with
> using multilingual support Wordpress plugins, or an opinion on which one we
> decide to use?
>
> Thanks :) Kat
>

-- 
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
Open Knowledge Foundation Brasil