Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-28741036-20190531182550/@comment-28741036-20190607200359

Thanks for your comments!

I'm gonna address all of your points one by one.

Andrewds1021: "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?"

I'd sure agree with you here, if it wasn't for the fact that the readership and the number of contributors on the English wiki alone has been on the decline for a long time. I doubt we have a large enough community to back the creation of 16+ dedicated wikis in their entirety. The translation of the few pages we selected is a one-time project, with no foreseeable expansion in the future.

Besides, I don't know if Fandom staff would let this one slide. Approving 16 interlanguage links at once, with all Wikis being run by the same two-man staff team, would be unrealistic imo.

"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."

To put it in a nutshell, each one of the language subpages is made up of hundreds of those Translation templates, which offer an easy way for the editors to translate from the original to their own language. One of the parameters is the original string, and the second is to be modified by the translators. This works in a somewhat similar fashion to Crowdin, if you've heard of that before.

"3. I guess that could work. But I don't see how it would be any easier to maintain than separate pages."

In this scenario, updating the original, English article would immediately affect all languages, because they're all based on the same page. If we were to choose the second option instead, we'd have to go through every subpage each time, even if it was only for changing something minor like a number.

"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."

Fair point, we'll have to consider that.

"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. 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."

True that, although I'm still skeptical about opening 16 new wikis at once, with a very high retention risk for our translators. I'm sure not all of them would be willing to take over the pages.

"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)."

Will definitely keep that in mind, thanks :)

Fngplg:

"dev wiki uses combined 1/2 approach. but you need some smartassed guys in order to understand how to it works and how to borrow it to your wiki."

Looks like we have to start hiring, then.

"i'd still back andrews in terms of different wikis: it simpler to use and maintain. in the mediawiki realm, it's also more intuitive way, most expected by editors."

I don't want to rule this option out yet, but it's very inefficient for such a small team as it looks like right now.

Thanks again, and have a nice weekend you two :)