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MultilingualWikiHowIsItDoneToday
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesHow do people go about producing multilingual wiki content today?
How does the community of translator organize itself?
What tools do people use toproduce multilingual wiki content?
What do they find easy or hard to do when it comes to producing multilingual wiki content?
It seems the most successful model for producing multilngual wiki content is what might be called "parallel authoring". The advantage of this approach is that it does not require close-coordination between the linguistic communities. Therefore, there is no need for tools and processes to ensure the equivalence of the content in the various communities. Another advantage is that it makes it easy for each community to focus on content that is most culturally relevant for a particular linguistic community. This the model used by Wikipedia, where somewhat separate communities are started for different languages. The main disadvantage of this approach is that it makes it difficult from the various linguistic communities to work synergistically together and to benefit from each other's effort.
AlainDésilets of the National Research Council of Canada is researching tools and processes to facilitate the collaborative production and maintenance of multilingual wiki content, in a way that fosters more synergy and closer equivalence between content on the various linguistic variants of a site. For more details, see this demo of some features he has implemented in his LizzyWiki engine:
http://lizzy.iit.nrc.ca/LizzyHelp/uploads/demo_of_multilingual_LizzyWiki_features.mov
It seems MediaWiki has a proposal for implementing better support for multilingual content:
CategoryWikiTechnology CategoryGlobalization CategoryUncommonWikiTechnology