How to organise translated pages in a wiki?

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Olivier Staquet wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>My name is Olivier Staquet and I work on the french wiki with some people.
>
Hi Oliver. Thanks for your explanation of the French wiki structure. We
can have a French (etc.) section of the main wiki, under an 'fr'
sub-page. The page currently called 'FrUtilisateurDebian' would then be
'fr/UtilisateurDebian' so that the full URL would be
'http://wiki.ubuntu.com/fr/UtilisateurDebian'.

The doc section of the main wiki would be 'Doc/...' and would contain
only English documentation. This English documentation structure would
form the basis for the semi-frozen wiki at help.ubuntu.com (or
docteam.u.c, or whatever). An equivalent 'fr/Doc/...' structure would be
optional.

So far, so good. The question now is how do we manage the translation of
the semi-frozen documentation in the 'Published wiki'? Do we export it
to DocBook and translate in Rosetta and then re-export to the wiki and
other formats or do we set up a localised structure in the Published
wiki and conduct the translation there? I think the answer will depend
on how well Rosetta performs this task and how well the
importing/exporting works (as still unproven). If we go with the second
option, we would branch localised pages of the doc pages in the tree, so
we would get /DocTopic/DocItem/fr as the French version.

A month before Breezy (say) the English docs would be frozen (except for
minor corrections) and translation would be stepped up, either by the
Rosetta route or in the 'frozen' wiki. Now, if there happens to be a
page in the open wiki that is nearly the equivalent of the
/DocTopic/DocItem page (fr/PageName in the open wiki), then that could
be used as the start for the translated page. In the dual-wiki model,
that is simply a question of copying and pasting the Moin source text,
while in the Rosetta-based model some more re-jigging would be required
(but not too bad).

With this set-up, I would be very curious to see if parts of the fr/
section of the open wiki would gradually and naturally align itself with
the English doc section. This would make maintenance easier, so it might
tend toward that.

- Henrik