Meta:Conventions for multilingualism
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To get a real multilingual Meta-Wiki, we need to establish some conventions for organizing pages and categories in different languages. The actual situation is:
- General: The main convention is translating the name of the original page. This may cause some problems like equal names in different languages or not knowing the language of the article by its name. If a page has the same name in two languages, you may create pages with language codes (e.g. "Name/fr" and "Name/es") and then create a disambiguation page under the name of "Name".
- Categories: By convention, each page should be put in a category with the ISO-language code of its language (f.e. Category:DE for german pages). There's no separate organization for separate languages. See Meta:Categories
- Help namespaces: There are many languages with their own help namespace (german, spanish, portuguese, among others...), several of which are currently actively developed, see also Wikimedia COTW/Help.
Current convention[edit]
When a name is used in multiple languages, we create one disambiguation page and then create each pages as its subpages.
Examples:
- Portada
- Portada/Es "Portada" in Spanish
- Portada/Ca "Portada" in Catalan
Uniform links[edit]
One possibility is using the same name for all the translations in subpages like in Wikimedia Quarto. This kind of names are like this:
The benefits are the folder structure, represented below the title with some links to the source pages. But this have cons too: It doesn't represent the structure of a complete set of pages in one language.
This convention suits well for particular cases like Wikimedia Quarto (one source in a language well-known, and a fixed structure for the set of pages), but not for general purpose because new pages in Meta are created in different languages and without an initial structure.
Multilingual pages[edit]
Each meta pages are strongly encouraged by categorized in their language. Language name is provided with the same manner the project language code is given (e.g. En, Fr, Zh ...) like
- Category:JA pages written in Japanese
- Category:ES pages written in Spanish
If your project code is different, please use it instead. All letters are expected to be written in capitals.
Thanks to categories, pages are easily listed by language.