Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

acawiki-general - Re: [acawiki-general] AcaWiki should be multilingual

acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Acawiki-general mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: Benjamin Geer <benjamin.geer AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [acawiki-general] AcaWiki should be multilingual
  • Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 09:53:45 -0700

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




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page