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)
 * Ok to clarify... an IP user goes to NL.genealogy.wikia.com and sees it in other language that is not NL? or do you mean that a register user is going to NL.genealogy.wikia.com and seeing their content with the designated language inside their preference? --
 * I unintentionally threw you because I didn't realize that nl.genealogy.wikia.com actually exists. Let's get real concrete with a working example:. IP user goes to this commons page and sees the row names for the Template:Information used on that page in english.  Eg: the Date row reads Date.   If you log into your commons account, and set your language to es, then go back to the same page, you will see the date row will read Fecha.  Now imagine that genealogy.wikia.com was like that.  (It isn't, you can only see the messages if you use &uselang in the url- For instance, compare infobox row names here to those above for Barack Obama.  But let's just asssume that the wiki was configured so that it did display messages using the user's language preference like commons).  Now, what I was asking was: What if someone logged out could type a url like es.commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Multilingual_Countries_Map.svg and have the default $wgLanguageCode not be en but es.  That way my visitor would see fecha etc.  When the user edited the wiki they would be otherwise working on the same wiki as everyone else.  Just their default logged out language would be different- that's all.
 * In case you are concerned about the message cache and performance- Actually, to avoid what would become a gigantor message cache, commons is only minimally using messages. For instance in the information template example, the first line of the main Template:information vectors to Template:Information/es using Mediawiki message "Lang".  - ~  Ph l o x   08:02, 26 May 2009 (UTC)


 * From a personal point of view i think that would not be a nice thing, for example it may work for genealogy as many pages are names, but if you have pages where their names are like in EN "order" in ES "orden" in FR "ordre" will confuse the new user why is he being redirected to a page with a weird name. Also there would be for every page x number of pages that each for each language and x number of subpages that would link to the proper name, seems a mess if you move a page you will have to update x number of subpages plus normal ones --
 * I think to missed the point of the example. On commons, if you change your default language to spanish you are not redirected to a new page. You still go to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Multilingual_Countries_Map.svg.  You are making this more complicated than it is.  - ~  Ph l o x   05:24, 27 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes and no... for me its hard to understand your idea because its easy to implement the commons, have you revise the templates?
 * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information
 * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information/en
 * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information/es
 * No.1 template what it does is moves the fields arround from the original call to the next template call to No.2 or No.3 but first it grabs/transcludes the info from MediaWiki:Lang (there it appears what lang you are using for log in users) if the /XX lange page exists it will display it, other way it will display de default one "/en".
 * So for me its hard to understand your idea since you can do it here already its a matter or reading the templates... --
 * mmm looks like here MediaWiki:Lang does not exists guess because this is work out in JS, mmm maybe thats the request you may need to do i think im going to suggest it i like it and its versatile enough --

You can set this on any wikia you are an admin on, then you can do the particular hack that Slomox came up with for commons's information template. I like that approach better than what I did in 2007 on the Obama page & its general infobox that is used on thousands of pages. The trouble is that a comprehensive use of this approach on a wikia can require tons of messages that even experienced wikitext users don't understand how to manipulate. It's also a huge coordination hassle with stupid discussions about what you can and can't use a particular message for. Make it a subpage template and everyone gets it and can do what they want without constraints. Plus they don't need admin privileges to change the form. This doesn't help me for my Semantic Mediawiki forms because Forms can't be vectored this way, but for most infoboxes, it is sweet.

But to return to the original question, neither way helps me with logged out users, unless they happened to arrive at our site with a &uselang value set, and that goes away the first link they click on.. - ~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  03:39, 28 May 2009 (UTC)


 * So it was as i said in my 2nd edit... its that if you use an URL to trigger some sort of &uselang default for that person not requiring that the IP user logs in to see it in the language they want but how you will manage with Rules names? Politics/es will redirect to Politicas? and Politicas/en will redirect to Politics, for names this is great, this will also kill all the genealogy wikis translations and smash them on a single wiki... if thats not the idea you keep missing me because a multi language wiki is what you want from my perspective (and seems that you and me are the only ones debating...).
 * A sort of work arround i can think is that you add some form of links in a template on top of each page that say "see this page in XX, YY, ZZ language" and there they will have set the &uselang= thing but the down side is that only for that page. --
 * Kind of like what I had on the Obama/fr page in 2007. It's only good for the first link.  Any subsequent link, the UI goes back to english.
 * We don't do general content like politics/ politicas. There are versions of pages in cyrillic and latin text.  What do you mean by this statement:
 * "this will also kill all the genealogy wikis translations and smash them on a single wiki"
 * I erred in my explanation because my recollection was that I used the message based template in the Obama/fr page. I didn't because what I was trying to come up with at the time was a better logged out user scenario.  Regarding the content, multilingual information was fed from a common page.  This has been abandoned in favor of storage of tabular content using Semantic Mediawiki.  It's not perfect because you can't store wikitext passages using properties.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   05:05, 28 May 2009 (UTC)