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Enjoy the conversation.
Amplify is a place to talk about what's going on.
It's as simple as that.
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| This is a test of the post by email function of 'amplify - multilingual' included into the page 'multilingual-wiki - net clips multilingual'. |
An article in the moinmoin-wiki about multilingual wikis and wiki engines.
What is a wiki, and why would we want it to be multilingual? A given mailing list normally works in a given language. Why would a wiki be different?
The answer seems to be that as a community grows, it spawns sub-communities that may work in different languages. In such cases, new mailing lists are created, for example. But for a wiki, things are more complicated, because unlike mailing list messages, which are transient, wikis contain permanent articles, and there may be a strong correspondence between articles in different languages. Thus, when a wiki community spawns a sub-community, it is normally insufficient to merely create a new, independent wiki. Instead, a certain amount of interlinking must happen, and it must be supported by the wiki engine.
However, if multilinguality is the result of the creation of sub-communities, it is important to recognize that these sub-communities shall generally work independently. Attempting to impose rules about blurring language barriers, forcing translations to exist, and ensuring a 1-1 correspondence between articles in different languages, may be counter-productive. Multilingual users are the glue that joins the sub-communities together in one large loose community, and if it weren't for them, we wouldn't have anything to discuss now. Thus, we must care about the needs of multilingual users, and make sure they can navigate and easily jump from an article to its alternative language version, but also recognize that a large part of the work occurs independently in the language sub-communities.
Read more at moinmo.in
