Re: wgo revamp timeline (proposal)

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

(Please keep marketing-list cc:ed)

On 7/7/06, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 19:26 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> > On 7/7/06, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org> wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 11:25 -0400, Guilherme de S. Pastore wrote:
> > > > Il giorno sab, 08/07/2006 alle 00.06 +1000, Jeff Waugh ha scritto:
> > > > > I think a worthwhile rule for this entire process should be: No criticism
> > > > > without solution. So please explain your point of view so it can be taken
> > > > > seriously, and offer a solution to go with it so you're also moving things
> > > > > forward.
> > >
> > > Any strong reason that MediaWiki doesn't work?
> >
> > I only look at this from the i18n/l10n perspective, so please bear with me:
> >
> > >From my understanding at looking at the MediaWiki source code,
> > MediaWiki supports localization, but with the concept of "one language
> > per installation". I.e. if we want to have the web site translated
> > into 42 languages, we need to maintain 42 separate MediaWiki
> > installations and databases.
> > This may be manageable for a site like wikipedia.org, but probably not
> > for www.gnome.org.
>
> The one-per-installation locale is only relevant for the UI of the wiki,
> not the contents.  So, while the "Edit" button will have the same
> English text in all pages, the content can be in almost any language
> without need for any further tweaks.  There are certainly issues with
> dates, etc.  But I'm not sure they obviously rule this greatly supported
> option out.

Ok. I haven't looked too closely at the database scheme, so I didn't
know this. Still, I think it may not be trivial to integrate our
current localization efforts and localization process with a
MediaWiki.


> > Ideally, there should be a minimum of efforts required to translate
> > www.gnome.org -- if translating or enabling a particular translation
> > requires sysadmin intervention, we simply won't have much (current)
> > translated content at all.
>
> Honestly I'm not really sure having translated website is such a good
> idea.  What I think is good though is having per-language "corners",
> better clearly separated through the URL (fa.gnome.org or gnome.org/fa
> for example.  The latter is easier.)  and let the language team publish
> their own content there, instead of trying to catch up translations of a
> moving target.  Of course, things like press releases or announcements
> are and will be translated.

We've reiterated this "localized content" discussion over and over for
several years, and the consensus has always been that official content
on www.gnome.org should have translations, while localized content
provided by local communities belong on other local community sites.
There are any number of reasons for this decision. The most recent
time this was reiterated was on GUADEC.
Is there something in particular about this decision that you dislike?


Christian