text: Help talk:I18n
  Contents
  - 1 Officializing ArchWiki Translation Teams?
  - 2 Jobinson
  - 3 Serbian
  - 4 Localized templates, categories and special pages?
  - 5 MediaWiki translation extension
  - 6
  "Dummy" interlanguage links and deprecation of Template:i18n
  - 7 Language namespace(s) in place of suffixes?)
  "Dummy" interlanguage links and deprecation of Template:i18n
  With this discussion I'd like to propose the implementation of "dummy" interlanguage links also for the languages hosted in wiki.archlinux.org as initially proposed (as far as I know) by User:pointone in FS#17580. Such a system would replace Template:i18n.
  I've revived this idea because with the latest developments to my bot (Wiki Monkey) I can now handle the transition with relative ease, see also #Bot algorithm below.
  Using interlanguage links instead of Template:i18n would give several advantages:
  - Grouping all language links in one place (currently local languages are in template i18n and external languages are in the left column)
  - Consistency with the behaviour of other wikis, e.g. Wikipedia
  - Restoration of the functionality of Special:DeadendPages, Special:LonelyPages, Special:WithoutInterwiki, Special:WantedCategories, Special:WantedPages and Special:WantedTemplates
  - If a language moves to its own wiki, its articles are already ready with interlanguage links
  Since version 1.11.0, Wiki Monkey should allow users to synchronize the interlanguage links of an article with the others of its "ring", although of course this feature hasn't yet been tested on large scale and will probably need to be fine tuned.
  Anybody interested? :)
  -- Kynikos (talk) 11:57, 1 June 2012 (UTC)
  - I fully support this idea. I would like to suggest at this point, since we are already considering a massive restructuring project and have a dedicated technical maintainer (thanks, Kynikos!) that we also migrate to the "namespace" solution at the same time. How much harder would this be to implement? -- pointone (talk) 14:34, 2 June 2012 (UTC)
  - Thank you for your support! About the namespace solution, it would be a lot harder to implement it at the same time of the dummy links thing, so let's discuss it in #Language namespace(s) in place of suffixes, also because it's not so straightforward and there are some aspects that should be evaluated carefully.
  - I'd like to read here possible opposing arguments to the dummy links idea, and instead, I'd like people in favour to answer #Dummy links format, #Interlanguage links sort order and possibly help with #Bot algorithm.
  - -- Kynikos (talk) 17:32, 2 June 2012 (UTC)
  - One problem I foresee is related to migration of a language to an external wiki. Once we are using dummy interlanguage links, it becomes more difficult to migrate content to an external wiki because there is no simple way to have both internal interlanguage links and external interwiki links for that language at the same time. Once the migration is complete, we would update the interwiki table to point to the external site, but during the migration (which has lasted months, in some cases) we would need a temporary solution. -- pointone (talk) 14:06, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
  - Good point, a possible solution I can think of is to create temporary interwiki links (e.g. ko-temp:Article) so that regular interlanguage links (e.g. ko:Article) still point to the local articles (e.g. Article (한국어)), which can in turn redirect to the respective external articles, if existing, through the temporary interwiki links. Ugly, but I guess working. -- Kynikos (talk) 16:06, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
  - I'm not sure I get it, I can make redirects work even with regular interwiki links (e.g.
  #REDIRECT [[wikipedia:Main Page]]), at least in edit previews ^^ Unless I didn't explain well my idea, which, I remark, is not aimed at making temporary interlanguage links, only redirects.
  - A possible question could be instead if we should apply this method also for the few existing French, Finnish and Swedish articles (my position is "no").
  - -- Kynikos (talk) 17:30, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
  - Of course, I misunderstood your idea. Ignore me! With regards to existing languages in transition I think we should be working harder to contact members of their respective communities to put together a coordinated effort to finish-off the migrations! (So, I agree -- "no.") -- pointone (talk) 16:28, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
  - Ok, the plugin for the bot is practically ready: this discussion hasn't received objections, asking for feedback on the English forum wouldn't make sense, and opening threads in non-English forums would require too much effort, so I'm considering this plan admin-approved.
  - I'll announce the change in ArchWiki:News once I'm ready to start.
  - -- Kynikos (talk) 11:45, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
  - I think the transition is complete, except for the fact that I will delete the instances of Template:Temporary i18n progressively over the next days.
  - Please report any bugs that may have arisen. A known bug is that the removal of Template:i18n and repositioning of existing interlanguage links has revealed a gap at the top of some articles that had the elements in the header misplaced: removing the responsible empty line fixes the problem, in fact there should be no empty line before the first line of content.
  - -- Kynikos (talk) 19:36, 15 June 2012 (UTC)
  Dummy links format
  If the "dummy" links idea is approved, there are two ways they can work:
  - Links add the language suffix implicitly (so for example the interlinks in Xfce would be bg:Xfce, cs:Xfce...)
  - this way is neater, but if one day we want to implement the "namespace" method for managing local translations instead of the current "suffix" method, Templates and Categories won't be able to use interlanguage links, and will probably need special i18n templates
  - Links must be added with the language suffix (so for example the interlinks in Xfce would be bg:Xfce (Български), cs:Xfce (Česky)...)
  Thoughts? -- Kynikos (talk) 11:57, 1 June 2012 (UTC)
  - I like the first idea. Links or title with foregin characters are much harder to maintain. I can not read them or edit them or even see them if the fonts are missing. Even as a Chinese user, open chinese pages is takes more time when searching because I have to swith between input method. To ease this task, I always search and open English page first and then click on i18n link. zh_CN:Xfce is easier to type and already contain all language info. -- Fengchao (talk) 07:21, 2 June 2012 (UTC)
  - Adding the language suffix automatically makes more sense to me. With regards to templates and categories, this is only a problem if we have a single "local" namespace, right? If every language has its own namespace, I don't see why this would cause problems. -- pointone (talk) 14:06, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
  - No, solution 1) prevents interlanguage links to templates and categories in every case: if each language has its namespace and we want to make it implicit in interlinks, these will have to be designed like, thus making it impossible to link to templates and categories :) -- Kynikos (talk) 16:06, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
  - An alternative to special i18n templates for Categories and Templates, in case of solution 1) with language namespaces, would be to create a redirect for each category and template: for example Lang:it/Category:Laptops redirects to Category:it/Laptops and this would make it possible to use an interlanguage link like it:Category:Laptops from e.g. Category:Laptops. -- Kynikos (talk) 15:16, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
  Link sort order
  For what I've seen around, the sorting order of interlanguage links is a common problem in many wikis: what will be our standard? I think there are 2 main choices:
  - Sorting alphabetically based on the local language name (e.g. fr:Article comes before fi:Article)
  - Sorting alphabetically based on the language tag (e.g. fi:Article comes before fr:Article)
  I vote for 1). -- Kynikos (talk) 17:32, 2 June 2012 (UTC)
  - I vote for (2) -- sorting alphabetically based on the language tag -- in the name of simplicity! For those not using a bot, it is much simpler to look at the first letter overall than the individual
  articlelanguage names. Also, we eliminate the problem associated with sorting non-Latin characters. -- pointone (talk) 14:10, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
  - Ok, method 2 is approved: the sort order will have to be documented in Help:i18n, Help:Style... -- Kynikos (talk) 11:45, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
  Bot algorithm
  If the "dummy" links idea is approved, this is the bot algorithm that will be used for automating the transition: please help make it as smart as possible (no signatures required for edits to this section).
  Prerequisites:
  Actually add the interlanguage links to the database, see #Dummy links format Create the temporary template (see below)
  - Fix all double redirects, if any
  Announce the change with a news entry and a post to
  - Update the documentation related to internationalization, e.g. Help:i18n, Help:Style etc.
  The bot will be run on lists of articles (e.g. categories) and it will process every article one by one.
  - For every article in the list:
  - If the article is not detected as English go to the next article in the list
  - If it's detected as an English article:
  - A) Collect the titles of all the existing articles that have the same English title for the other languages (avoid the languages that have local articles but also their own wiki, like French, Finnish and Swedish)
  - For each of these titles (including the English one):
  - If it's a redirect, follow the redirect and recurse at A)
  - If it has an i18n template and the title in the i18n template doesn't correspond to the one of the article (except for the language suffix), use that title to recurse at A)
  If the title has the Temporary template (see below) raise an error and request manual intervention
  - If a conflict is found (a title for a language that already had another title in the collection) raise an error and request manual intervention
  - Once the collection is ready, create the string with the actual interlanguage links and add it to every article in the collection, either at the index of already existing interlanguage links, or in place of Template:i18n or by default at the top of the article; also add a temporary template to inform users of the change in i18n method
  Once the bot reaches the end of the list:
  - Manually check Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:I18n and Special:WithoutInterwiki for the articles that haven't been processed and possibly re-run the bot on a new list.
  - If nothing's left to do, delete all the instances of the Temporary template and delete the template itself. either. templates.
  -)