Multilingual Decks
+overview
The proposed multilingual functionality is intended to be a general solution applicable to all Wagns. However, it has been inspired by Wikirate.org, and many of the examples below will borrow from that site's structure.
The proposal seeks to honor these constraints/considerations:
- everything is a card.
- a user should only see content in a language that he/she understands unless there are explicit instructions to break that pattern.
- a user who understands multiple languages has the potential to play a special role in an international community: translator.
The essence of the proposal is that there will be two new settings: *name translation and *code translation. Rules based on these settings will initially support these values: universal, monolingual, strict, free, and patterned.
Anyone reading this is warmly invited to contribute use cases to explore how they may be addressed in the proposed system.
+needs
Standard practice among wiki communities, most notably Wikipedia, is to have separate sites for different languages. There is an en.wikipedia.org and an nl.wikipedia.org, and while there are some connections between them (same technology, use of Wikidata, shared governance...), they are, by and large, separate projects with separate communities.
A Wikipedia-style solution will not work for many Wagn sites, many of which are intended to support one set of unified data in multiple languages. For example, consider Wikirate.org. As the name implies, quantitative data is quite central to WikiRate, and rich, nuanced interactions with quantitative data are core to what we are trying to achieve. Many of those numbers (eg transparency scores and voting that feeds into them) are based on micro-interactions on the site, and our vision of transparency for those numbers depends on our being able to see exactly where they all come from.
All of this means implementing WikiRate's vision on separate sites, as Wikipedia does, would not work. We do not want companies to score differently in different languages, nor do we want to multiply a company’s' reporting overhead by asking them to respond to the same questions on multiple sites. We don't want transparency scores to be based on separate sites that users can't see. Perhaps most importantly, we want the world-wide community of wikirate users to be able to speak with a unified voice in pushing to "make companies clear" and to enjoy facing the cross-cultural challenges of working on this together.
Current problems / bugs:
The following issues are problematic even in monolingual (non-English) contexts:
- lots of hard-coded English, no default content for other languages.
- the current name key mechanism is based on English pluralization
- international content basically works, but sometimes (as in inclusion and probably links) content is breaking largely because of unicode characters getting treated as html entities. We may be able to change this behavior by messing with this tinyMCE setting (they've changed their dosc infrastructure, probly need new link):
+solution