[acawiki-general] AcaWiki should be multilingual

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Wed Oct 7 12:53:45 EDT 2009


On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 4:53 AM, Benjamin Geer <benjamin.geer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a PhD student, and I have a blog where I post summaries in Arabic of recent research that's been published in my field in European languages.  I was hoping to be able to contribute these summaries to AcaWiki, but I was disappointed to find that it's English-only.
>
> AcaWiki is a great idea, but it's unacceptable for it to be monolingual, all the more so if it's aimed at a general audience.  Most people in the world don't speak English.  Moreover, English-speakers already have much easier access to scientific knowledge than non-English-speakers (other things being equal); it's the non-English-speakers who most urgently need something like AcaWiki.

Hello, and thanks for posting the first message to acawiki-general!

I don't speak for AcaWiki, but FWIW, running a multilingual wiki or
other site that works well is pretty difficult. I've tried a bit on
wiki.creativecommons.org and mostly failed. To start a new language
Wikipedia (where each language gets its own independent mediawiki
site) a bunch of content has to be created in an incubator to ensure
there's an adequate community to keep the Wikipedia instance going.

I don't know what the right language strategy is for AcaWiki
(possibilities range from none to independent sites like Wikipedias to
mixed content like Wikimedia Commons to a mixed site like the CC Wiki
to only automated translation like opened.creativecommons.org is right
now. Do you have ideas? Tests that could be done in your userspace on
AcaWiki?

Mike



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