International Wikis (2010 edition)

Question

So, there were some discussion about how to handle internationalization in the past. Some things have changed and we have a lot more experience. So I think it's worth to review the situation and our plans.
We finally have a simple but well working interwiki implementation; the same that is sued for wikipedia. (see http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17580) There is no automation or checking so far; but usage is quite straight forward. I would propose the following:
* An english article links to several international articles. E.g.: [[de:Pacman]], [[pl:Pacman]]
  (note that the title of the target wiki has to be used here)
* The localized wiki article will link to the english site only ([[en:Pacman]])
* Non-English articles on wiki.archlinux.org have to be merged/moved to their international wikis if that ist available.
  Don't forget to empty the article (including all category references and i18n templates) here and add a redirect like
  #REDIRECT [[de:Pacman]] (note: has to be in first line)
* To move complete articles export it including its history and import it again on the target wiki. (you'll need admin
  permission on the target wiki)
This is quite some work, but should be doable with the help of the community.
I know that this also implies that the "separate wiki for each language" approach is the preferred one. This also would make some of the work that was put into the i18n template stuff obsolete as this is provided by the wiki software itself now. (it will generate a "other languages" menu automatically etc.)
I hope you guys don't mind that much and see the benefits; especially in long term. I don't want to force it for every language though but suggest to join this wagon. If needed I could provide help for international communities to setup their local wiki. In fact it would be best if we all use the same setup: http://projects.archlinux.org/vhosts/wi … x.org.git/
This would also make administration of the english wiki easier and improves the search a lot which finds a lot of foreign language duplicates atm.

Answer 1

We can start by moving the Swedish articles.
I guess the long-term solution would be separate local wikis per language hosted by the same people hosting the main wiki. Three drawbacks with local wikis are that you would need to register separate accounts to edit different wikis, it’s harder to handle spam if the localized wikis don’t have users patrolling them regularly and you don’t move user accounts. I don’t think those drawbacks should stop us from cleaning up the main namespace, but maybe there are other solutions apart from hosting multiple wikis I haven’t considered.
Is it possible to get a Swedish wiki running at a sub-domain of archlinux.org with interwiki links set up to and from the English wiki? Preferably updating the MediaWiki software would not be handled on a per-wiki basis because rarely used languages would soon use older versions. All wikis should be upgraded at the same time and use the same configuration.
In the Swedish pages links pointing to the English articles would break after a move. The solution I prefer is using redirect pages. That way, if you create a Swedish pacman pag,e you don’t have to modify any links in other pages.
The work flow would be:
Set up localized wiki.
Update interwiki settings.
Leave a message on the talk page of a couple of contributors of the localized pages.
Move page (using transwiki importing).
If needed clean up links by adding redirects back to the English main wiki.
Update interwiki links to and from the English wiki.
Repeat step 3-6 for all pages.
(Optional) Translate page titles to localized versions.
Repeat step 1-8 for each language.
Does that sound about right? I can set up a wiki page for coordination if this is the way to go.