How to organise translated pages in a wiki?

[Matthew east]

sorry henrik you will get this twice, pressed the wrong button :/

On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 22:47 +0100, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> It is currently done by adding an extra hump to the from of the camel,
> like:
> http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/FrAutresLogiciel
> http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/ItalianSpamFiltro
> ... without much consistency
> 
> When moving to the Moin system featuring sub-pages, we could set up
> sections like
> EnDocs and FrDocs contain the respective doc trees EnDocs/Pages and
> FrDocs/Pages
> 
> or we could have just one documentation tree, with localised sub-pages,
> like Mypage/fr and Mypage/de. In that case, the default page would be in
> English and there would be a  varying number of language sub pages.

I agree in principle that the second solution is better organised and
would encourage translation of the wiki as a whole. However my gut
reaction is that it would not be practical and that the first approach
is necessary. The current approach (see
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/ItalianDocumentazione and
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/FrenchDocumentation) is that the various
languages have very much their own corner of the wiki, so that rather
than being simply translations of the english part of the wiki, they
have their own organisation and in some cases content. The French
project is particularly notable for having a unique design and content.

I think we need to draw a line here when thinking about translation,
between the wiki in general, and the official documentation which goes
into each Ubuntu release. The wiki is in eternal flux and does not lend
itself to translation very well: what is translated is essentially with
a view to giving some users some quick answers, without necessary having
any kind of control on reliability or versions of documents. Some pages
address problems specific to a particular country, others address
problems specific to a particular locoteam. I think this sort of thing
is best kept on a EnDocs/Pages FrDocs/Pages basis.

On the other hand the official documentation produced by the
documentation team is easier to translate, being relatively static when
frozen for a particular release. Our current approach is not for this
documentation to be translated on the wiki at all, but through Rosetta,
and inserted into svn as you rightly observe.

So in sum my personal view is really that, although the second scheme
that you've sketched out is extremely attractive, i think that the
flexible and changeable nature of the wiki does not lend itself easily
to that sort of translation. I would also say that each language's
corner in the wiki has an important uniqueness to it that I feel is very
valuable.

Matt
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