[Mageia-i18n] [proposition] Using Translate extension on Mageia wiki

[Romain d'Alverny]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 13:31, Oliver Burger <oliver.bgr at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 18. Oktober 2011, 13:11:33 schrieb Romain d'Alverny:
>> On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 20:27, Yuri Chornoivan <yurchor at ukr.net> wrote:
>> > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate
>> >
>> > This extension can significantly ease up maintenance of the translations
>> > with no additional efforts to sync translations with original (automatic
>> > synchronization).
>>
>> Actually, we didn't plan to manage l10n that way, but by having
>> distinct wiki instances per locale (wiki.mageia.org/en/,
>> wiki.mageia.org/fr/ and so on) and interwiki-link them. The same way
>> Wikipedia does it actually (and we used to at MDV as well).
>>
>> So using this extension means a significant change in how we lay things out.
>
> Since I was away for a few days and had to do some presentation yesterday, I
> only now could look into this.
>
> Please correct me, if I'm wrong!
> If I understand this correctly, it wil kind of force syncronization between
> the en wiki and the others.

As I understand it, it gives translation progress stats between
locales and allows to translate chunks by chunks (so it's a 1-1
translation, with less freedom for a given locale to do things a bit
differently - for good and for bad).

> As I said in last i18n meeting as well as in doc team, I'd like to keep the
> more important things like
> - really important documentation
> - errata
> - information about the project
> - ...
> in sync.

That's clearly a nice feat; does it do it really with this extension?
Couldn't this be done as well with a watchdog script on a given set of
defined pages, which reports is fed into i18n web page or ml? (or even
use mediawiki page watch feature directly).

> But I do see fields in which a dezentralization is important as well,
> e.g. planning an event can be done very nicely using a wiki (like we did for
> FOSDEM 2011 or MandrivaUser.de does for some time.

Well, decoupling is not always best, but it helps

Here are issues I see with the extensions:
 - non-localized URLs (instead of w.m.o/en/Home and w.m.o/fr/Accueil
(ie, localized title _in_ the URL), we would have w.m.o/Home and
w.m.o/Home/fr (English title in the URL); that's not blocking, but
that's not so good either;
 - inconsistent navigation in a chosen locale (tested on the KDE Userbase wiki):
   - my browser accepts French as a primary language, so content is
returned to me in French;
   - I decide to look at the Spanish version of a page; fine, it
works; my intent is to navigate the Spanish-speaking pages now;
   - clicking on another wiki link will forward me to the default URL,
that will be rewritten in French => back to French, where I would have
expected Spanish;
   - right, digging into this, this is because those links are
prefixed such as: "Special:myLanguage/Applications" which rewrites to
Applications/fr
 - we didn't plan to setup the wiki that way *, and that's a
significant change, so either that is really important for you and it
has to be considered _now_, or it can be done differently with the
planned wiki setup.

* expected wiki setup is:
 - http://wiki.mageia.org/en/
 - http://wiki.mageia.org/fr/
... and so on, with locale aware interwiki links (the way Wikipedia
does it). It certainly has drawbacks too. But the point is that things
get done in the end.

Romain