Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 11:45 am Post subject: NeoWiki in French
Ok, i've put up a french version of the wiki.
I do not speak french.
During setup it asked for unicode or latin. Well, I took latin in high school, so I picked that. If unicode was the right answer, i think i know how to change it.
Also, I have made it so it uses the same image directory as the main wiki. HOWEVER. It does not yet see what was previously uploaded, only what was uploaded through it.. so for right now upload is diabled so i can figure this out.
I did a ductape type of install, not the eloquent multi-wiki setup that i had hoped. So one of these days I plan to change that... when i figure out how. (something about sim-links)
Concerning character encoding, I would have chosen Unicode but Latin will be OK.
If you are able to understand some Latin words then you'll be able to understand some french words
If it isn't too much trouble, use Unicode for all languages that you add. It will make life much easier as you can then put text that is not supported by the more restrictive character sets. For example, with Unicode, I can put Japanese and Arabic text within an English document.
Yeah, the accents aren't working right here, either.
Nor is interwiki linking of the sort [[fr:Accueil]] or of the sort [[neowikifr:Accueil]] Somewhere the domain/namespace mapping got messed up or wasn't created. All the links between them currently have to be long, external links....
And you've uploaded the ship without the dropshadow and all that
Seriously, thanks! We'll work out all the little details in due time
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
ok, does the french part of the wikipedia display right for everyone? if so that is a quick test to see if it is me or the software.
Oui! fr.wikipedia.org displays properly. It's encoded UTF-8, as is NeoWiki (en).
Note that what displays incorrectly on NeoWikiFR (no matter what encoding you tell the browser to use to override the set encoding) is the "skin" stuff.
The user-entered text displays OK in Latin-1 but horribly incorrectly (the accented letters turn into giant spaces) in UTF-8.
So what I think happened is that when you chose Latin-1 at the beginning, all the pages were encoded in Latin-1. Now that you've changed it to UTF-8, it only changed the page header (to make it claim UTF- but the all the stuff (esp. the skin, which we can't edit) is still actually encoded in Latin-1, thus the mis-display....
Or something like that, becuase the accents in the skin didn't display correctly when the page was Latin-1 encoded, either. Hmm.
(I've now "fixed" the accents for UTF-8 in the main page "description" of Neo/J only--i.e., "La suite stable..."--which was simply a matter of re-inputing the correct ones.)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Let me explain an approach for issue #2. I don't know if you have time to implement this, but Apache has the ability to serve different pages for the same requested URI depending on what the preferred language that the user's browser is to. I use this feature at http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/ to route user's to a localized set of pages. What I think might make sense from an ease-of-navigation and ease-of-administration standpoint is to move the existing English pages to http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/en/ and have the French pages at http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/fr/. Then in http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/, there would only be one valid URI: index.php. You could then add the following entries in your .htaccess file:
Code:
Options +MultiViews
AddLanguage en .en
AddLanguage fr .fr
ErrorDocument 403 /
ErrorDocument 404 /
Note that "+MultiViews" and "AddLanguage" entries. Here's how this works:
1. Instead of creating an "index.php" file, create 3 files: index.php.en, index.php.fr, index.php.php.
2. When a user hits your site (and is essentially asking for the "index.php" URI) with English as their preferred language, Apache will automatically serve the "index.php.en" file. It French is their preferred language, they will get "index.php.fr". And, if neither matches, they will get "index.php.php".
I'm probably being picky, but I noticed two issues with the French NeoWiki:
1. There are no cross-links between the English and the French NeoWiki. In other words, if you are in the English NeoWiki, there is no "French" link.
Jake doesn't have things set up correctly I've been reading at the mediawiki Meta-wiki but I've yet to find all the details on how things are supposed to be set up, but wikipedia is a good example.
You can also have a bar on the bottom, like we have Categories now on the NeoWiki, that links to the article in another langauge, and I'll probably add that, too, when things are all working.
The problem is that none of the interwiki link syntax is working for NeoWikiFR/NeoWiki. In either, we can go [[Wikipedia:Mac OS X]] and get a link to the wikipedia's Mac OS X article. We *should* be able to do [[fr:Accueil]] and get the NeoWikiFR main page (and [[en:Main Page]] from the French wiki to get the English), or even at the most extreme [[NeoWiki:fr:Accueil]], but this doesn't work yet.
Like I said, I'm not sure of all the implementation details, but the wiki(s) can be set up in such a way that creating these linkbacks is trivial. And I want this as much as Patrick; I wish I could be more helpful technically. Wikisource does this simply with namespaces; Wikipedia with full subdomains (so they get the interface localized, too, like NeoWikiFR).
I imagine once Jake gets the interwiki linking solved, this will also be solved, or at least be trivial then Maybe not.
Let's see if we can't get Jake to take off work next week and fix the wiki so we can cram and localize all the articles in French and German before Neo/J 1.1
(ducks and runs back to working on meshing Patrick's quotes with the Announcement so we can at least have that frozen to be localized before the launch )
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
THe main issue I have right now (other than the accents) is that I have to have a full version of the wiki software for each wiki. When there are two, that isn't so bad to keep updated... I am suspecting, however, that there will be more than that.
What I would like is just a central place for the software to live.
Also, a 'Main' wiki page needs to be set up to then direct to the languages.
and all of the interwiki stuff is new to me, so i'm learning as i go, but the hope would be that there would be links between the wikis.
THe main issue I have right now (other than the accents) is that I have to have a full version of the wiki software for each wiki. When there are two, that isn't so bad to keep updated... I am suspecting, however, that there will be more than that.
What I would like is just a central place for the software to live.
Also, a 'Main' wiki page needs to be set up to then direct to the languages.
and all of the interwiki stuff is new to me, so i'm learning as i go, but the hope would be that there would be links between the wikis.
Here's a thought:
If you can use subdomains, add one for english, french, etc and use the same script, but alias to a different configuration script for each, using different database prefixes.
I would guess this is how the folks at wikipedia have done it. If it is not, you might be able to ask help form Brion Vibber, a leading Mediawiki hacker who is generally quite responsive to user questions. _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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but the all the stuff (esp. the skin, which we can't edit) is still actually encoded in Latin-1, thus the mis-display....
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