Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-1807002-20151120021458/@comment-4731443-20151120062528

''P.S. I wrote way more than I expected. The short version is: it has been done, but I wouldn't recommend it.''

I'm not sure how well it would work, but it is certainly feasible. w:c:wlb went for that approach, so you could ask them what it entails. I saw #invoke somewhere so I would guess that they use Lua to work with the "uselang" URL parameter and determine which localized content to use. Their approach "forgets" the selected language from one page load to the next, though, and all pages have English names, so I don't find it particularly user-friendly and it's probably bad for SEO if that matters to you.

If you choose to link two wikis instead, I believe there are ways for a parent wiki to share its media with its children wikis. That and an export/import would probably help set things up without copy-pasting and reuploading everything. After that, the two have to be maintained separately, but except for site-wide settings that's basically what you would have to do anyway.

Keep in mind that even if you make a single bilingual wiki, I expect there will be a lot of template rewriting to do. Your base templates won't have meaningful names for your French contributors, your item names in premade templates (for example) will all need to be translated (assuming the subject of your wiki is localized), and categorization may prove difficult.

Your idea to have a link to the other language on each article is nice in theory but also difficult in practice. The only way to "automate"/standardize it that I can think of would be to use something like Main:Subject <-> Main:Subject/fr. Otherwise you need to specify the translated article title on each of these links (which is not that much more work than translating the rest of the article, but still), e.g. Main:Subject <-> Main:Sujet.

Another point is that providing French translations in an English interface makes it look like an afterthought and I'm not certain how useful or appreciated it will be. If your French visitors can't read the article contents in English, will they be able to navigate the English interface? And vice versa: if they can make sense of the interface, do they actually need the content to be translated to understand it? I think the answer lies somewhere between yes and no, so this is just food for thought.

Lastly, if we consider more long term implications, is your subject also localized in other languages? Will people want to make a wiki about it in those languages too eventually? How will they want to integrate with yours? From that perspective, I think two languages could work, but three? four? Things would get messy.