Wikipedia talk:Multilingual coordination

Note: For an early parallel effort, see Wikipedia talk:Multilingual coordination/International Wikipedia Homepages

Updating the front page of ru.wikipedia

(Ramir 09:59, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)) Who can approve the draft of the Russian Wikipedia's front page and replace the old version with it?

Translations update

There would have been an easy solution that would have had neither problem:
Put in the new software with all the new texts replaced by the single translation that was available.

In that particular case it would be theoretically possible to have done so, yes. Brion

Thus, to get to a solution that we both agree on.

1. Could I please get a current version of languageNl.php file?
There's several more things that need to be translated, as well as some errors to be corrected (I just noticed that we have 'ipblocklist' and 'ip_block_list' interfering, and the Spanish and Polish language names would better be changed, for example)

Up-to-the-minute everything can be gotten at: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wikipedia/phpwiki/newcodebase/

Currently editable copies are scattered across meta and the various wikis; a standard place might be a good idea.

Also -- I forgot to mention this earlier, but everybody please take note! The software is under *GPL* license, not *GFDL* like the

_content_ of the wikis. They're similar, but not exactly the same... if you've submitted changes to one of the language files over the wiki, I'd much appreciate it if you could drop a note explicitly mentioning that you agree to license your changes as GPL.

2. Could things be taken care of so that for each language at least someone hears of it whenever there is a change, and can send you any new translations that might be required? Andre Engels

Hmm, in theory I could rig up an automatic message to intlwiki-l

whenever a change is committed to Language.php, with a diff included. That would save the too-common case of "I'll commit this now and ask for translations later" followed by "oops, I forgot". :) Brion

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Russian and Latin links on Recentchanges

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump

After adding ru: (Russian) and la: (Latin) links here (Wikipedia:Recentchanges, from whose Talk page this is copied), I've thought about it a bit more, and think both of them having a link would be rather unjustified. But then, I started trying to figure out which one (if not both) should go, and I found a little dilemma. Should "popularity" for the purpose of which languages get links on major pages be based on how many people speak the language, or how active its Wikipedia is? Russia (obviously!) has more speakers, but the Latin Wikipedia (much to my surprise) is several times more active (mostly with German people, oddly enough). So, in a case like that, which one, if either, should stay? And even if it's the general consensus both ought to go, we should still work out which way to figure "popularity" anyway, for future clarity, if it hasn't already been worked out. And if it has been worked out, could I get a pointer to it? -- John Owens 04:35 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

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From the "article", section 3 (Statistics):

There are so many Wikipedias now that we should rather list 30 biggest, not 20. Taw 00:45 28 May 2003 (UTC)

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6500 > 676 = 26*26

I wonder how to get 6500 languages encoded with just two characters... Right now I think it's at least good to realize that this is impossible. So that there can be some anticipation and acceptance of 3- or more-letter codings for languages. --Guaka 13:35 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Standards are good: RFC 3066: Tags for the Identification of Languages --Brion 19:04 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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Two things:

• would someone update the statistics ?
• Romanica Wikipedia which is listed as an active one since May redirects to the Main Page of the English one

Thank you,
Kpjas 07:51 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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I finished translating the Albanian Wikipedia (http://sq.wikipedia.org) and it is all set up to work (but there are 0 articles :). Is there a central place where this could be announced and automatically added everywhere, or does it have to be manually included everywhere? ¬ Dori 15:59, 14 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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Is there any easy way to update this page with the instantaneous article counts of each of the international wikipedias? 147.8.235.63 04:36, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)

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Language code: minnan

I have noticed that there is a language coded "minnan:", using more than three characters. Its multilingual link does not go with the other languages, but stands out in the main text. For an example, see the project page of this discussion, notice the "other languages" box and the bottom of the main text. Is there any plan to fix it? -- Felix Wan 23:49, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Stats

Contributors per million Internet users

"For what it's worth I tried to establish the ratio of active contributors per equal number of internet users that speak that language.

So per language the figure shows that one of x thousand native speakers with internet access contributed to Wikipedia in that language

Polish          22
German          31
Dutch           39
Hebrew          40
Danish          44
Swedish         49
Catalan         49
French          49
Finnish         51
English         53
Norwegian       55
Hungarian       94
Romanian       109
Slovenian      117
Italian        166
Japanese       168
Czech          216
Spanish        236
Vietnamese     367
Greek          386
Portugues      431
Russian        638
Chinese        687
Turkish        725
Arabic         870
Malay          967
Korean        2920

For contributors I used wikistats from Feb 26 (counts registered users > 10 edits)

For internet users per language, I used figures from Global Reach (2003)

Of course I don't know how exact these figures are, but I assume they did some homework.

Note: the GR figures list native speakers, so languages with international appeal would show lower participation ratios (higher numbers in the table) if all web users that might be inclined to use that language were taken into account. GR mentions India specifically as a country where the web language is English and not Hindi."

I received as comment that Global Reach data for Polish data were from 2001, others from 2002/2003, but even then they sat on top:

"Even when we take the 2004 forecast of 9 million Polish internet users instead of the 2001 figure of 6.9 milllion, the pl: ratio is 1 contributor per 29 thousand, which still makes pl: first on the list." Erik Zachte 15:35, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Interesting. I have had a feeling that Polish and German contributors are particularily active in Wikipedia, and that Poland and Germany are in some way "overrepresented" here. I only wish some of them were more focused on constructive work rather than Polish-German edit wars (like Talk:Gdansk).
--Kpalion 16:43, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Articles per million speakers

Here are the numbers of articles in a selection of Wikipedias by numbers of speakers (excluding artificial languages):

Language - Wikipedia articles per million speakers

1. Danish - 3105
2. Estonian - 2641
3. Swedish - 2405
4. Slovenian - 1906
5. Catalan - 1058
6. Dutch - 993
7. Hebrew - 895
8. English - 655
9. Croatian - 599
10. Finnish - 596
11. Polish - 520
12. German - 436
13. French - 374
14. Japanese - 250
15. Romanian - 145
16. Italian - 111
17. Spanish - 54
18. Chinese - 5

--Kpalion

This is interesting statistics. Do you know what are the current figures? --Romanm 13:54, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

(Contributors, please add the date, so that we don't have to dig in the page history.)
"My" Maori Wikipedia would be quite high on that list, with a figure of over 900 (having at least 145 articles today and only 160,000 speakers (according to the 2001 census), 99% of whom speak English just as well or better). Welsh would be at or near the top of the list, with 2792 articles for under a million speakers. Robin Patterson 06:35, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Contributors per million speakers

Here a new list, looking not at Internet users, but total population. The Icelanders are to be lauded in their attempts to build an own Wikipedia. - Andre Engels 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Speaker data for most languages from http://www.nicemice.net/amc/tmp/lang-pop.var.

Legend:
*	data from Wikipedia,
@	data from elsewhere.
=	separate languages on the source, one on Wikipedia,
!	one language on the source, several on Wikipedia,
*s	Wikipedia number lowered because it would otherwise have been on the list.

(what about numbers in parens?? +sj+)

lang.	Wikipedians per million speakers	Wikipedians	millions of speakers
na	285*	2	0.007
is	36.0	9	0.25
de	22.1 (27.3)	2680	121
he	21.5	110	5.1
da	20.0	100	5
oc	20.0@	7	0.35
sv	18.5	167	9
nl	18.2	383	21
gd	16.6*	1	0.06
cy	15.0*	9	0.6
et	12.7	14	1.1
fy	12.3*	9	0.7
en	12.1 (17.7)	5717	470
no	11.6	58	5
ga	11.5	3	0.26
fi	8.3	50	6
eu	8.3*	5	0.6
gl	7.7@	24	3.1
ca	7.6*	38	5
pl	7.4	327	44
fr	5.3 (9.2)	666	124
nds	4.5@	9	2.0
ja	3.7	472	125
sl	3.1	7	2.2
af	2.3	15	6.4
it	1.8 (2.9)	119	63
cs	1.8	22	12
hu	1.6	25	15
hr/bs/sr	1.5	<=33	21
bg	1.3	12	9
nah	1.3*	2	1.5
el	1.0	12	12
lt	1.0	4	4
ro	0.9	25	26
es	0.7 (1.0)	281	362
ms	0.6	11	18
sq	0.6*s	4	6
als	0.6@	1	1.5
lv	0.6	1	1.6
tt	0.3*s	2	6
yi	0.3@	1	3
ko	0.2	75	17
pt	0.2 (0.2)	49	182
fa	0.2	6	27
ku	0.2@	3	11
tl	0.2	3	15
ka	0.2	1	3.9
ru	0.1 (0.2)	39	288
zh	0.1=	1064	194
ar	0.1=	16	135
tr	0.1	10	59
vi	0.1	7	67
uk	0.1	5	41
sk	0.1*	1	5.6
gn	0.1*	1	6
id	0.0 (0.5)	9	140
sw	0.0 (0.4)	2	30
hi	0.0 (0.0)	5	418
ta	0.0 (0.0)	4	69
ml	0.0	3	34
su	0.0*	1	27
ur	0.0	1	57
jv	0.0	1	76
mi	0.0*	0	0.05
co	0.0@	0	0.34
mk	0.0*	0	2
st	0.0@	0	4.2
mg	0.0@	0	9
om	0.0@	0	9
az	0.0	0	14
th	0.0	0	21
mr	0.0	0	65

Old talk, jun 02 - jun 03

(newer comments at the top; deserves a second archive.)

Can I know when the Catalan wikipedia will have a .ORG version? Thanks. 30/6/2003

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13/03/2003 Can you consider modifying the software to allow easier translation? I am thinking of a new checkbox field next to the summary titled "Incomplete translation". All pages marked as inncomplete translation could be channeled to a page containing the list incomplete pages, which could be checked by contributors willing to translate just a few lines.

This can be accomplished by creating a page, perhaps something like Wikipedia:Incomplete translation. Include a link to this page on any incomplete translation, then you can simply call 'what links here' from that page to see the pages in progress. --Brion 21:52 Mar 17, 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, but it places the burden on the tranlator to create the link, while the spirit of wiki is to make things easy on the author.

Well, next someone will ask for a special checkbox titled "needs spelling correction", one titled "Needs more links", one titled "use proper format for citations", one titled "break up into sections", one titled "how about some images?", etc etc. I fail to see how pasting in "[[Wikipedia:Incomplete translation]]" is such a great burden, particularly when you can do it right now at the click of a button. It's zero burden! --Brion 23:01 Mar 25, 2003 (UTC)

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how do you handle internal differences in a language, e.g. britain/american english? -- german wikipedian

Both are acceptable. Consistency within an article is preferable. For page titles it is useful to have both, one with a redirect. See also Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ. - Patrick 12:46 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

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24/06/2002 Can the numbers of pages of the English Wikipedia also be listed on the table. Now you can ask the current status but so far i know there is no history like for the non-english wikipedia's. -- giskart

12/08/2002 If you list the non-wikipedia wiki Encyclopedia like

http://enciclopedia.us.es why not list the non-wikipedia wiki Encyclopedia http://susning.nu ? ([1])And how about English stads ? -- giskart

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Now that the Japanese wiki has changed to the new software, it only lists 5 pages as being "real" in its statistics page. How should we count it from now on? Some of the 23 that are listed are user pages and such and not real articles. Similarly for the Chinese wiki. The Wikipedias in question are still small, but they still do not deserve to have their count inflated. Is there a better way of reckoning than the "," method? Scipius 13:35 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)

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Basque wikipedia still alive!!!! Still looking for new baskpedians? and making some propaganda around... User:Drpolilla

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Has anyone ever considered importing the db from the sevilla university wikipedia? they have a lot more stuff, why not? Or is there a specific reason? Lightning 23:08 Oct 13, 2002 (UTC)

That is a possibility. However most of their "lead" in article count since the fork has been through the creation of thousands of virtually empty city templates. I for one don't want to have so many useless pages dumped into the Spanish Wikipedia. Also, when they jumped-ship and went to Seville they took the UseMod es.wiki database with them and converted it for use in an early version of Phase II PediaWiki. The result was thousands of bad convertions that left hideous amounts of white-space inbetween many paragraphs and the loss of many months of UseMod article histories. es.wiki didn't lay completely dormant after the fork either and many improvements were made to it since the split. What I have been doing is using EL as a source for new articles for es.wiki by first improving them for EL and then copying the result to es.wiki (stating

in the edit summary that the text is from EL). I prefer this human method of importing and forsee them doing the same as soon as the es.wiki community is rebuilt. It is unfortunate that they choose to stay separate before we were able to present them with a reunification offer but I do think we can still work together in an amicable way. --mav

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This page calls for various translations of the copyright message. Is this still needed? Christian 16:14 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

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Why is this page tracking Susning.nu's progress? The leader of that project has said on Wikipedia-L that he doesn't intend to merge the project with Wikipedia and that it has disparate goals from Wikipedia's.

If we track Susning's progress, why not also Everything2? --Larry Sanger

Well, since this is the umpteenth remark regarding Susning and EL not belonging in this list (and I've not heard anyone advocating that those Korean or Fact Factory clones should also be counted), I've gone and removed them as of today's update. Since EL does not seem to want to rejoin us either for the time being, let's just limit the list to wikis that are true Wikipedias. Susning and EL can still be found via the BiggestWiki link at the bottom. Scipius 16:51 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

Actually, I'd like to add them back. It offers a very good comparison and reality check for Wikipedia. The important thing is that since Susning and EL are GFDL Wikis, their pages can be integrated with ours. Whereas Everything2, for example, cannot.

Or is Susning GFDL? Looking at it, it looks like it isn't.--The Cunctator

For the rest of us, could someone please at least spell out what "EL" stands for, - and maybe tell us (or link us to someone who does) who and what this (Susning, Korean or Fact Factory clones, Wikipedia-L) is all about.

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I'd like to redirect this page to Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination. I think that better expresses the intent of this page, and doesn't carry any nationalistic baggage. It's also an active name--describes an ongoing process, rather than a fuzzy entity of unclear definition. --The Cunctator

I agree. It is more correct to say that Wikipedia is a multilingual project. Saying we are international misses the point and excludes nationless languages like Esperanto or even Latin. --mav 22:43 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

I'm somewhat perplexed by this comment. Esperanto is "the international language", and fits perfectly under the name "International Wikipedia". Heck, our page on Wikipedia in other languages is called Internacia Vikipedio, of which the late title of this page is a direct translation. --Brion 07:56 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

That aside, there is still the fact that we are divided up via language and not nations. --mav

Yes, not being divided up by nations makes us international instead of national. ? --Brion 08:24 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

OK now this has degenerated into pure semantics. Yes you are correct, but international still connotates an emergent property of many nations and not many languages. --mav

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Somebody! Please help russian Wikipedia! ... Andrew Vovk 18:10 Nov 7, 2002 (MSK)

I forwarded your message to Wikipedia:Mailing lists, the Mailinglist for technical issues. It would be helpful if someone of the russian wikipedia who speaks english could subscribe to the international mailinglist Intlwiki-L. Wikipedia:Embassy is another good place for international communication. --Elian

I set up a Russian section on the new server: http://ru.wikipedia.org/ . Should work more cleanly; I've configured it for UTF-8 (eventually we'll be merging all languages into a single database, so it's preferable to use a consistent charset); it should also accept incoming URLs that have been encoded as Windows-1251 if necessary. By all means, please join Intlwiki-L, and help on localizing the interface. --Brion 18:55 Nov 7, 2002 (UTC)

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I am translating the Phase III software to portuguese, and I have an issue. In portuguese, Encyclopedia is "Encliclopédia", with the accent. IMHO, Wikipedia should be written as "Wikipédia", in portuguese, although this is not true in the current version of the portuguese wikipedia.
Another issue - in the portuguese alphabet the letters W and K officially are used only for foreign names, there aren't words in portuguese with these letters. But I don't think it's a good idea to change it to Uiquipédia our Viquipédia, right? Yves

Whatever you guys like... the French wiki uses Wikipédia in places; in Esperanto we call it Vikipedio, and the Korean wiki spells it 위키백과. --Brion 03:04 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)

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This page displays some information which is outdated. I think it should not stay that way.

In particular, it is still indicating a list of international wikipedias who are supposed to need copyright text to be translated. This is probably a year old and is not true anymore. It is misleading people. It is indicating translation should be given to Jason, who likely do not take care of that matter. Brion is. It is signed by Larry, who is not doing anything special on that matter. I?d like to re-factor that. However, it is likely some of the wikis need that translation. Please, could you update your own wiki ?

I think this is important, for newcomers come to that page, much more easily than to the meta, or to the mailing list. It is not good to mislead them into needs that are no more current issues, nor is it efficient not to indicate them actual needs.

I renew my wish for having references for the ?Wikipedia:vandalism? pages for each international wiki.

To stay on the translation matter : what is important now, and need to be addressed, is the issue of translations to be taking care of each time a change is made to the software (new feature?). I?d like to know what would be the easiest way to assure php-language translations stay accurate as much as possible, and to give us and Brion as little pain as possible in translation update.

Would anybody object if I cleaned up the place ?

user:anthere

Goodness, how could anyone object! Please do. :) I'll go see if I can rig up an automatic notification for changes on the messages file. --Brion 08:37 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

You are welcome to clean up. I even asked for this some time ago (Please see my comment above from October 18). I started a little today, by sorting the table alphabetically (this has been annoying me for some time :-) Christian 18:18 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

Request for statistics data for nn.wikipedia.org

Hi. Can somebody please organise for nn.wikipedia.org to be included in various meta:Statistics data? It was created July 31 and is already proving to be quite active. It would be nice to have today's data for future reference. I would like nn: to be added to:

• Data in the form of http://wikimedia.org/stats/[site-url]/, i.e. http://wikimedia.org/stats/nn.wikipedia.org/
• Data as seen in the tables in e.g. http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm

Cheers! BjarteSorensen 06:23, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC) (nn:User:BjarteSorensen)

RFC of Spanish Wikipedia

Hi! I can't seem to locate the equivalent. Administrator Dodo has unilatarally deleted portions of Lupang Hinirang in the Spanish site. I already wrote some admins. Thanks.--Jondel 01:55, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Zulu

Zulu was started in the future (2005), wikipedia can predict like nobody else. 24.201.116.26 03:36, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Speculation regarding % of English articles

Moved from page itself, as suggested:

Of course, this share decrease will eventually have to slow down as various saturation effects occur, but maybe not for quite some time: the dozen (roughly) languages in the 5000-10000 range have monthly increases mostly at 10% or above, while (en) remains at 7%. A purely linear (read: dead wrong) extrapolation using 0.93%/month implies that (en) should hit zero percent share by the end of 2007. So reasonable guesses at where (en) will eventually asymptote by the end of 2007 could be anywhere in the range 20%, 10%, 5% or 1% (that last figure meaning that - if English had continued at its current numerical growth of about 30,000 per month - the others would have at least 150 million articles between them) - any predictions? And will an asymptote really be approached by end 2007? (The speculative (read: dead wrong) material in the second half of this para probably belongs on the Talk page.)

Moved by Rob 14:03, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Amharic corrupted

As someone who can read a little Amharic, I tried to read the Amharic Wik - to no avail. All I could call up were one page with little boxes (perhaps amharic that my computer couldn't recognize) and other pages with pornography. I hope someone with the right know-how can get rid of the latter (It was in English and had nothing to do with Amharic or Ethiopia) and look into the former. Kdammers 07:14, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

What about cross-references?

I think it would be a good idea to have links to articles in the language of the subject where appropriate, e.g., the article on Göttingen/Goettingen (Germany) in non-German Wiks would have a link to the (presumably larger) German Wik site on Göttingen. This would be especially helpful for sites with different spellings and letters. Kdammers 07:14, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I notice that German Wik does this.Kdammers 08:05, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Suggestion: Closing down the Finnish Wikipedia

Seems the Finnish Wikipedia is becoming increasingly corrupted by false and inaccurate articles. These articles are usually examples of very bad humour, occasionally rasist, and usually inaccurate. In fact, the only times nowadays I see Finnish Wikipedia pages is when someone gives me a link to one of these "funny" articles.

In the interest of accurate information I therefore suggest that the whole Finnish Wikipedia is closed down. Obviously we as a nation are too immature to use and create such an important resource.

Interwiki links

Is it just my browser, or did somene turn off interwiki linking?

• • These work on talk pages, but not in the articles - which is where they are really needed! Uncle Ed 16:33, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Linking to the multilingual portal

Is there a policy on linking to the multilingual portal? www.wikipedia.org? I've been adding links to it in several places in the English wikipedia, and discussing whether it should be linked from the English Wikipedia's Main Page, but as I am struggling to find many links to the multilingual portal (this page doesn't have a link, for example), I was wondering if there was a reason not to? (Apart from the fact that it is displaying strangely at the moment) Carcharoth 09:59, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Sindhi

Hi, My name is Ali Hassan and I want to start a sindhi wikipedia. I have read the set up language information but I have a problem. The thing is one already exists but in Devanagri alphabet. I want to create mine for the people that use the Arabic alphabet for Sindhi. I do not want to create a joint devanagri/arabic site as that would be useless and irritating. Kashmiri and Punjabi currently use two alphabets and its very frustrating to click on an article and to recieve it in an alphabet that you do not understand. I want to start a seperate Sindhi Wikipedia but as there is already a Sindhi page I am confused as to what to do. Can we have both Wikipedia's called Sindhi and then have the name in the appropriate alphabet written behind it? As they are both legitimate forms of the language I cannot think of a fairer way to handle this but any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

There are similar cases throughout wikipedia, like the two forms of Norwegian, Nynorsk and Bokmal. You could use Sindhi (arabic) and propose a rename for the current Sindhi as Sindhi (devanagri), as to not have an "official" form of Sindhi when both are. Rhe br 17:40, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

amharic characters in windows

hey, does anyone know how to get amharic characters to display in windows? 66.169.0.252 23:51, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Russian Latvia

Vyt(Vyt I've removed the #Russian Latvia (Русский) started December 2002 because "Russian Latvia" is something of real nonsense or a political game: there is no such language as well as there is no such country. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Vyt (talk • contribs) 15:51, 15 May 2006 (UTC).

How many articles from non-English wiki are have equivalents on English wiki?

A question I asked at WP(A) - perhaps you know the answer? Please post there.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 21:22, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

ISO 639-3

Any plans to use ISO 639-3 in the near future? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 12:41, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Ancient Greek

I'm not sure if this the right place for this question, but what about a wikipedia in Ancient Greek? I know its weird, but theres one in latin. 58.107.95.163 08:41, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Ɛʋɛ > Eʋegbe

Where should I go if I want to change the language name of a Wiki? The name of ee.wikipedia.org, the Ewe Wikipedia, is currently spelled "Ɛʋɛ" in interwikilinks (among other places). This should be Eʋegbe however.

I'm a sysop on ee.wikipedia; you can reach me or on my English talk page. — mark ✎ 21:02, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Fixed. For future reference, one has to file a bug at Bugzilla for Mediawiki to have this changed, as these names are hardcoded in names.php. — mark ✎ 12:12, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Banana respubliko de Esperanta Vikipedio

Well in case you hadn't guessed, that means "banana republic of Esperanto Wikipedia"...

Over there, I remove a template which says (in so many words) "this page is currently undergoing a major edit; please refrain from editing it, to avoid edit conflicts" from a page which had not been edited for about a month and a half. An admin reverts my change (i.e. replaces the template) using rollback! I try to complain to the admin concerned, only to find that he has protected his talk page!

Stay here in the English site, it's safer... Sid van Goj 19:37, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Scots

It's not on here, but it's on the web. [sco.wikipedia.org]

Tool to spread interlanguage links

Is there a tool that starts with, say, an en: article and collects up all the interlanguage links from all the languages linked from all articles and then updates all the articles to all have the same set of links? For example, if X is an article at en: with links to de: and ja:, and at de: there are links to es: and fr: and at ja: there are links to ko: and no:, shouldn't all of these articles all link to {en: de: ja: es: fr: ko: no:} minus the local language? This assumes that if en:X is the same as de:Y and de:Y is the same as fr:Z that en:X must be the same as fr:Z (and vice-versa in all cases). Are there cases where this wouldn't be true? -- Rick Block (talk) 18:57, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

That job is done by bots. They perform a great deal of work that would take too many useful human resources. However, they lack judgement and sometimes, the help of a human is required, particularly when translation is not enough and we need to find an idiomatic equivalent. The job can get messy when it comes to categories, where humanities are confused with human sciences and social sciences in many languages. And then there are categories for natural sciences, exact sciences, hard sciences, should I go on? So yes, in some cases en:x is not always equal to fr:x even if they are both linked to es:x. — Robin des Bois ♘ ➳ ✉ 00:03, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Related proposal... Articles sharing images in the m:commons are often on the same topic, particularly where those images are only referred to by one article per language. It would be helpful to have a way to check (what links here) for such commonalities and flag it for followup, either to the respective talk pages or to a multilingual action list. Logically, this search would be done whenever a new Image link is added or soon after.LeadSongDog 19:58, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Unifying policy for all-language Wikipedias

Is there a unifying Wikipedia policy (even the five pillars or WP:NOT) that applies to all languages of Wikipedia? Basically, I'm asking how committed to the original vision of Wikipedia multilingual Wikipedias are. Can they form completely different rules/policies/guidelines based on the local consensus, or do the basic principals still apply? The Hebrew Wikipedia seems to me very censured, and I preferred to ask about it here rather than there. LeaHazel : talk : contribs 07:41, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Indeed he: wp seems to have their own set of rules and if you don't speak the language, they will not make you feel very welcome. I got blocked just because I made 5 mistakes in the categories!... Some admins there are overzealous and a bit xenophobic. And quite rude in their communications! So if you don't really need to do anything there, don't. You'll avoid a lot of frustrations. Robin des Bois ♘ ➳ ✉ 23:38, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, it depends on (a) what it is you're doing, and (b) what your language skills are. I'm moderately active in interwiki editing, but I generally don't do anything except add interwiki links and images from Commons, simply because I don't speak the language(s). Once you get outside of that, you're kind of asking for trouble if you don't know what you're getting into... EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:36, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Belarusian

Can anyone tell me what happend to the belarusian WP? All the interwikis to the be: articles are now useless. I think that all 6835 articles have been moved to an Old belarusian wiki. The prefix be: leads to blank articles and if you want to use be-x-old: to get to the previous articles, it won't work for some obscure reason. Why was that done? Why not create another wp with a new prefix instead of making things complicated and move an entire wiki in another place? Robin des Bois ♘ ➳ ✉ 23:50, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Identifying Wikipedias

This is a fairly trivial suggestion: For each wikipedia, put its name in the lingua franca or the six languages of the UN on its main page somewhere in the header or footer. I frequently find myself looking at newly linked "In other languages" articles related to articles I edit, but frequently find myself unable to identify the tongues. For instance, I recently saw the John Naisbitt article get a link to the Српски / Srpski coverage of the same topic, but, having not heard of said language, I ended up having to bounce through several pages to find that it was the Serbian Wikipedia. It could have been resolved with one click if the page had simply said
"Wikipedia: الصربية,塞尔维亚人, Serbian, Serbe, серб, serbio" or something along those lines in the footer of the Main Page. Thanks! MrZaius^talk 18:46, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

An option would be to instal Tra's sidebar translator script into your monobook.js file. Just add {{subst:js|User:Tra/sidebartranslate.js}} and save (maybe refresh) and it'll translate all the sidebar stuff into English. I love it, though you'd have to do some major copying/pasting to get it to work on non-en Wikipedias. EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:41, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Flags/logos/icons for identification of languages

I'm looking for some consensual depictions for languages, distinct from national flags and wikipedia's. My immediate use is for pages like http://www.lingvoj.org/lingvo/fr.html which identify languages. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Flags_of_languages does not provide many ressources, let alone consensual resources. Anyone interested in this? universimmedia 09:49, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

What is this page?

... is it an overview of multilingual coordination (top of the page) or a discussion forum (bottom of the page, also here)? I think that the page needs some cleanup, but was wary about tagging it with {{cleanup}} as it isn't an article...

In case an outsider's viewpoint is of help in developing this page (please ignore if it isn't): I came to this page from the main page of Wikipedia, expecting an overview of how multilingual coordination works on Wikipedia: how many languages (and which) are represented, how they interlink, and most importantly how they interact. Is there exchange (via translation) of content between different language wikipedias? How much are the different wikipedias biased towards the viewpoints of the countries in which they are spoken? etc.

Mike Peel (talk) 22:12, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi Mike,

Here are some ome short answers:

• Articles are linked together with interwiki or interlanguage links; find more information here
• A list of all Wikipedia editions and their language codes can be found at m:List of Wikipedias.
• Translation is not very common between wikipedias -- most Wikipedia editions choose to write articles from scratch. However, there is an active translation project here.
• You might be interested in the Wikimedia Embassy system as well.

Finally, cross language issues tend to get debated on the Wikipedia-l mailing list (but more and more on Foundation-L instead). Every Wikipedia is supposed to represent NPOV, so should not be biased towards national viewpoints.

Hope this helps! -- phoebe / (talk) 06:47, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

ee:User talk:Mark Dingemanse ja:山本五十六

Interwiki on THIS page (Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination)

There is a severe interwiki conflict, because some interwikis lead (currently) to foreign equivalents of List of Wikipedias. Virtually, most languages have namely a list of Wikipedias, not a page on multilingual coordination. Therefore, I will remove all such links from here (and corresponding foreign pages) and bind them with “List of Wikipedias” instead. Since this page is obsolete, it is unlikely that this trouble emerged yet another time in the future.

Note that I do not ask help nor considerations. I just inform the community (including one of some non-English wikipedias) about my intentions. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 12:00, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Could the word "Languages" be changed to 'The Article in other Languages"? It would more explanatory to explain the article a person is reading is available in a similar article in the other languages listed. The word "Languages" itself meant to me a list of Languages in Wikipedia, not the article I reading is available in other languages. Jcardazzi (talk) 18:15, 26 April 2015 (UTC)jcardazzi

Khowar Wikipedia?

Anyone know the status, if any, of a Khowar language Wikipedia? This is claimed at Rehmat Aziz Chitrali, but all I can seem to find is a stray incubator page. Dl2000 (talk) 18:16, 25 October 2015 (UTC)