Dwarf Fortress Wiki:Centralized Discussion/Translating the wiki

Translation of the Wiki ?

Hi guys !

For a non-bilingual person, playing DF is much more challenging because of the complexity of the vocabulary ingame. Translations are pretty hard, and sometimes impossible. So giving the possibility to anyone to translate some pages could be great for the community growth.

I'm a contributor of the french wiki since a long time, and i'm thinking about an easy way of translating the wiki in various languages, as Spanish, french, japanese, chinese, german, russian, whatever... But i have a problem with the french wiki : it has a lack of contributors, a lack of efficient templates and an outdated content. This, in my opinion, is due to the dispersion of the french community. We have 3 main forums, and the owner of the French wiki is, by far, the less active.

Actually, i think that the easiest option to go that way is doing just like the official Wiki of the (awesome) game OpenTTD : Making a simple template that allows you to switch the language of a Page at any moment. It means that all the translated pages of the Wiki must be hosted on the domain dwarffortresswiki.org.

I'm talking about this template : http://wiki.openttd.org/Template:Other_languages

I know what you'll say : what about the Bandwidth? What about stocking all this new content on the Wiki ? I think that it's not a major problem because the actual pictures of this wiki can be used in all the translation pages. No need to adapt the pictures to another language, because the game is only in english. Stocking only text shouldn't be a big problem. The second point is that if my idea works incredibly well and the number of visitors/contributors of the wiki is exploding (strong assumption), it should be easy to make a donation system for the wiki.

So IMO, the system of translation of the openttd's wiki is powerfull and brilliant.

What do you guys think about all this ? PS :I'm not sure if it's the right place to post this. PPS : i'm sorry for my awful english grammar and my poor vocabulary ^^' --Darkomen (talk) 22:09, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

This has been suggested before, and personally I think it's a good idea (it's hard for separate sites to get enough attention). I've actually been working on setting up Mediawiki's multilingual extensions to work on this wiki (see User talk:Briess#Additional languages for a history of my attempts), although there are still a couple remaining issues that prevent it from being usable with our current database. :( Hopefully those issues will be sorted out eventually, though - the major ones are set to be fixed in the next official MediaWiki release, which we're planning on upgrading to once it's available. --Lethosor (talk) 00:08, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

What do you think about the OpenTTD template i mentionned before ? You think it has a lack of features, or it isn't reliable enought to be used on this wiki ?--Darkomen (talk) 09:28, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

It works, but the problem is keeping translated pages up-to-date. Basically, it gets hard to keep track of changes when the page gets modified in one language but not in another. Without looking at the page history for every language, the differences are really hard to keep track of. The Translate extension makes this a lot easier, which is the main reason we're trying to use it instead. --Lethosor (talk) 15:39, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

You're right, OpenTTD is a very unbugged and stable game, with only a few new features over the years. Thank you for your answer, i'll wait for the MediaWiki update (may 2014 as announced by MediaWiki). --Darkomen (talk) 17:49, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

An update:

Mediawiki 1.22.1 was released a few days ago, which fixed a major bug that was keeping the Translate extension from working. Unfortunately, I won't be able to test this for around a week or so, but hopefully I can get it working fairly soon. There are still some unfixed bugs with 1.22, so we may end up having to wait for another bugfix release to upgrade.

A thing to note is that Mediawiki updates can take considerable time on this wiki, partly due to its size. There could potentially be some downtime during the upgrade when it happens, which hopefully won't coincide with a DF release (not that we know for sure when either will happen). —Lethosor (talk) 01:04, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi all. I think we can start translating pages right ahead if a new Namespace set is created for each language. Then, after the proper Extension is set up, it would be just a matter of properly moving the pages. --Envite (talk) 20:04, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

I think that could work as a temporary solution, but I'm concerned about keeping track of changes (which is the main reason we want to use the extension). Also, I'm uncertain how well namespaces would work for this wiki, since we use them for versioning (and the new release would create more confusion among non-English speaking players over which content is relevant). Maybe subpages would work, but they would conflict with the extension when/if we set it up. I'm not opposed to starting translations, though - I think having content in other languages would be a good way to bring in new players and contributors. I'm just not sure how to go about it, and I haven't had much time recently to make the extension work for us. —Lethosor (talk) 03:51, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Nothing has changed two years later... That's quite frustrating to me... There are so many non-native speakers that would be really pleased to have an help in their own native language.--Darkomen (talk) 16:42, 30 April 2016 (UTC)