[dokuwiki] Re: Multilingual wiki
- From: "Terence J. Grant" <tjgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 14:19:09 -0500
Just a thought ...
What if it was all stored in a single page, with a syntax plugin to manage
tagged content in containers:
<lang_en>
...
</lang_en>
etc.
This has come up before...
The big problem with this, really, is the question of whether of
editing pages-- will you be editing a page with
<lang...></lang><lang...></lang><lang...></lang><lang...></lang> all
over the place? Or will you have to modify the editing scheme to edit
only one section, which then begs the question of how to add further
languages...
Another underlying problem is the interface being in say, en, and
you're serving pages in fr, es, cn, or whatever; there's certain
implications (such as the default character set sent by the headers,
and the interface still being in another language.)
Lastly, I believe the wiki pages should in a sense, still be able to
be used as .txt files in documentation; a bunch of <lang...> tags
might clutter it up too much.
As previously mentioned, I don't think you can really expect page.txt
to be page.txt in another language; it would be just as weird to
expect to type "en:allons au cinéma" for a french page translated to
english.
No one yet has mentioned how exactly you tell if the page actually
exists in the other language... doing a bunch of file_exist calls
(even a few per page) can be expensive in terms of time. (I've tested
this myself...)
My idea...
Personally I believe it might fit better if we were to duplicate
somehow mediawiki's style-- the way they do it is to add a tag to a
page when it's available in another language, a sample from the
wikipedia en page for "Flu":
[[sk:Chrípka]]
[[sl:Gripa]]
[[fi:Influenssa]]
Which is then how they generate the "in other languages" portlet on
the left; and are able to link to pages with their proper titles in
their respective languages.
To do this, we'd change the syntax of this command of course since it
conflicts with ours for normal links, and somehow set up the urls for
the different languages; I think it would be unreasonable to lock
people to use "domain.com/wiki/$LANG" just as much as it would be to
say "$lang.domain.com/wiki". Each ideally should be configurable.
I also believe the best way is to separate each wiki into it's own
language config; the simple way would be to do something akin to a
wiki farm.
Alternatively, what always comes up is the "per namespace
$conf['lang'] change" but I don't think anyone so far has succeeded in
doing this.
Finally of course we'd need a function that returns the collection of
different languages, so we could display them to the end user. Ideally
I think we could have something that essentially generates its own
sub-page like mediawiki, but an array filled in would be ok too.
Just my recent thoughts on this anyway.
--
--Terence J. Grant(tjgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxx)
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