Forum:Default language

Our subject matter at genealogy.wikia is inherently multilingual because ancestors oftentimes have numerous descendants speaking disparate languages. The facts about name, birth and death form the essential content and this is easily made multilingual. If the tables come up in the visitor's language, we are delivering substantial value to them- and fortunately we can do this with int messages. For instance, see this Barack Obama article in French. I knew there was an important issue with logged out users but until recently it was only theoretical. We are getting indications this may become more than a theoretical issue because we have some active contributors that want their content in dutch.

I was thinking, is there some way to have a domain name set the default language? Eg nl.genealogy.wikia.com sets default language to nl? My understanding is no, because mediawiki namespace messages use the basepagename for the default language.

If anyone can think of an easy way to achieve this goal, that could prove to be valuable. It's not like this is any kind of pressing problem at this point, so don't waste any time on it- maybe keep it in mind though. Theoretically, this sort of thing could become a key competitive advantage our wikia has over the big boy genealogy sites like ancestry.com because we could draw on a global set of contributors. - ~  Ph l o x  19:42, 25 May 2009 (UTC)