Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-28741036-20190531182550/@comment-9605025-20190531204453

Here are my thoughts:
 * 1) This option, as you stated, offer the most flexibility and will probably be easier to manage in the long-run if you end up translating more pages and/or want to have a place where users can converse in a language other than English. You have over 500 pages. If they are worth keeping around, why aren't they all worth translating?
 * 2) I don't understand how that template is supposed to work or how it matched with the method you described in the earlier section.
 * 3) I guess that could work. But I don't see how it would be any easier to maintain than separate pages.

In terms of monitoring, I am not sure I really see much of a difference between the 3 options. In each case, you would need to update/monitor each language version of each translated content. I am not convinced it would make a significant difference whether it is on the same page or not. As you noted, the single-page approach has the drawback the you would need to search the page for the language you want to edit. Along the same lines, you won't be able to tell which language was edited unless you view the actual change. If you at least used the subpage idea, you could easily tell just by the page name. For example, let's say I edit the main page. Which language(s) did I edit? Does the Spanish version need to be updated? What about French or Polish? If you use a single page, you will need to check the edit and determine which languages still need to be changed. By comparison, if you at least used separate pages and I edited only the main page, you would know that all other languages need to be updated.

In short, I think that separate wikis is the best for the long-run and flexibility. Also note that it can easily accommodate the difference between left-right and right-left reading languages. Although, admittedly, there are far fewer right-left languages than left-right languages. In terms of monitoring them, you could ask for volunteers who speak the language. Perhaps your translators would be a good group to ask first since they seem to care enough to at least help out.

If you really don't want to have separate wikis, then I would suggest using the subpage idea. Yes, you would need to edit a different page for each language, but each page would be much easier to maintain since it won't be cluttered with 16+ languages. Also, you could quite easily develop a simple template to access the different languages (as opposed to developing whole script for it).