Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-131168-20141218145255

First a bit of background. I'm an editor at a wiki built around Japanese music. At one point we sought out and made interlanguage connections with other existing wikis covering the same topic. At some later point it became a project of mine to improve the non-English ones, even though English is the only language I know at all well. I realized if I could make sure the appropriate templates had local versions, I could set up a sample page in a target language and copy over the plain facts while ignoring any English translations or prosey sections like Trivia. This would result in a basic-but-decent page in another language. So I did this for a while. The thing was, I came to realize I'd still have to repeat many of the same steps for every single language, and thought about whether there was some way I could paste in this shared information into pages for multiple languages at once--and came up with the process I'm using now.

I make a page using a lot of placeholder content. Sections might look something like

==#^FeaturedMembers^#==
 * Wada Ayaka
 * Maeda Yuuka
 * Fukuda Kanon
 * Ogawa Saki

or

==#^SingleInformation^#==
 * ^CreditsLyrics^#, #^CreditsComposition^#: Tsunku
 * ^CreditsArrangement^#, #^CreditsProgramming^#: Fujisawa Yoshiaki
 * ^CreditsChorus^#: CHINO

I then replace the placeholders with a list of terms gathered from existing pages, online translations/dictionaries, and some bilingual people willing to lend a hand. I'm using a simple PHP program to do search-and-replace, but I'm sure one could do it any number of ways. One could even do it using Wikia alone, but calling a template to check for the appropriate local term so many times seems like a really inefficient way to handle things.

Not everything can be handled perfectly this way. Things like dates or the way numbers are written may differ from language to language, and trying to do this beyond European languages would present a whole new set of problems. Things like images and videos also still need to be added to each language's wiki separately. BUT it's all still a lot quicker than trying to handle them each individually as I was before.

Sample near-identical page in Czech, Italian, French. 