9 Mar
2007
9 Mar
'07
8:38 a.m.
On Mar 9, 2007, at 7:01 AM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
The warning can be placed in the template, so it will
always be
visible.
Anyway, I think that placing the documentation in another place is
not good. It is hard to track changes on the main site and do the
same thing on 3-4 different sites, when the pages are not linked.
Having all the translations in one place is good. What we can do,
is to make a velocity script to display pages with no <lang>
version, pages where the <lang> version is more than 2 weeks older
than the english version, etc.
A drawback is the fact that objects aren't translatable. This means
that comments are per page, not per translation, and this will
possibly create a mixture of comments in "all the languages of the
word" (hopefully).
Yes and that's already a pain in the FAQ zone.
-Vincent
Sergiu.
On 3/9/07, lopensource-cestbien(a)yahoo.fr < lopensource-
cestbien(a)yahoo.fr> wrote:
yep,
Sure i dont see the daily number of contributions, maybe u're
right ;)
The only fact wich is difficult for me to understand is that there
is only one english version even if there is some users that ask
for french documentation..maybe they would like to contribute,
maybe not..but where can they contribute ?
You say about professionnal way, professionnal team and quality.
Trying one french instance experimentation is a good way : i think
authors must be called "french XWiki community" instead of
"Official XWiki team".. Poor number of contribution on this
instance will only say that there is not enough french users in the
french XWiki community who would like to contribute on XWiki french
website, and not that the XWiki or XWiki team aren't anough qualified.
When you are saying about your experiment, i understand that the
french version will be outdated, and i agree. You say about Jakarta
Cactus outdated documentation that create a lot of feedbacks. I
think a french user that discover XWiki website and don't speak
english will create same number(even more!?) of feedback : FAQ /
comments or simply don't come on this website...
About the work needed to administrate this french instance, i
completely agree. This is a critical point... I understand that
this could be a main reason to avoid creating french version (for
now ! :)). So maybe the official team could create the french
instance with a warning "this website isn't official and is updated
by users temself, please go to the official website for an updated
content" or something like this (sorry for my poor english ;p)
any way, thanks for your feedback Vincent.
Boly38
----- Message transféré ----
De : Vincent Massol < vincent(a)massol.net>
À : xwiki-users(a)objectweb.org
Envoyé le : Vendredi, 9 Mars 2007, 0h01mn 34s
Objet : Re: [xwiki-users] translation of the documentation (ie. in
french)
Brice,
I forgot to say thanks for bringing this up and many thanks for
wanting to contribute documentation (this is not often that it
happens and it's great you're stepping up! :)).
This is a topic we've mentioned several times in the past but we've
never really tackled it so this is a good opportunity to discuss it
all together.
Once more I don't want my previous email to be viewed negatively. I'd
also really like to have XWiki doc be translated into lots of
languages. I'm just warning about the side effects... :)
Thanks again
-Vincent
On Mar 8, 2007, at 11:58 PM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi Brice and everyone,
My current thinking:
* English should always be the default
* XWiki.org web site has to be of good quality. Our old
old.xwiki.org wasn't good enough and contained lots of half
finished stuff. It wasn't "professional" enough and was giving a
bad "reputation" to XWiki. As XWiki.org is the official web site
for XWiki we need it to be of professional quality. This has to be
re-conciliated with the fact that any registered user can edit/add
documentation to it. Not an easy task but one I've dedicated myself
to by checking daily what gets added,etc and steering the
community. However I *know* I won't have the bandwidth for keep
track of xwiki.org's content in several languages and keep the same
quality in all languages.
* My initial thinking was: everything should be in English so that
all efforts can be mutualized and efforts are not lost in
divergences. I still believe this is the case because frankly seen
the number of edits we have I don't think there are enough
documentation contributors to allow several language translations
to be done and to live on. Brice, you're comparing it to Wikipedia
but do you know how many people are contributing daily there? :-) I
wish we had that number...
* I think we should provide a space for users who want to translate
XWiki documentation in different languages but I don't think these
translations should be "endorsed" by the XWiki development team as
we won't be able to guarantee the quality. I think they should be
maintained by contributors only. As a consequence I think the best
is to create a translation web site on the XWiki.com farm for
people who are interested in translating the xwiki documentation
(we could even possibly provide such a site on xwiki.org, as
<language>.xwiki.org (and xwiki.org/<language> would redirect to
it using URL rewriting). We would need a big disclaimer on these
sites saying that:
1) this is work done by contributors and not by the XWiki
development team
2) that the official site is http://xwiki.org
* It's a pity we don't use the XWiki internationalization feature
for this but I don't see how to reconcile the points above with it
and I'd rather we not use this feature than risk disappointing
users if they see incomplete or low level documentation in some
language.
* To be honest I'm personally really skeptical that such
translations will work. As the creator of Jakarta Cactus, I have
experienced such kind of translations and it has never really
worked. Translations are always months and even years behind the
official translations, you get emails on the project mailing list
asking for support because they're looking at an outdated
documentation, and the solution is on the english documentation
page.
<more thinking...>
* Hmm... I guess we could turn on internationalization for
xwiki.org but:
1) we would need to find a way to put the disclaimers I mentioned
on *each* translated page as a header for example
2) we would need one translation champion for each language. That
person would be dedicating himself/herself to drive the
contributions for that language, to organize them, guarantee a good
quality level, remove wiki vandalism as they happen (this happens
daily but to a small degree)
WDYT?
Before answering, please bear in mind that today I am doing 90% of
the work for xwiki.org so it may sound easy but it's a lot of sweat
and hard work and it doesn't happen automagically :-)
Thanks
-Vincent
On Mar 8, 2007, at 11:21 PM, lopensource-cestbien(a)yahoo.fr wrote:
> hello,
> I m new user of XWiki, and i want to help the xwiki "community"
> translating the documentation (ie. in french). I was starting
> doing it on xwiki.com on the "Admin guide" some days before but
> without any permission. So today, i asked you here how must we
> process ?
>
> I got a mail from Vincent Massol and so, some questions are :
> - how can't we be sure that the french version of the
> documentation will be an updated version ?
> - how prevent new information(s) on the french version that
> wouldn't appear on the english one ?
> - what will be the interact(s) between a french and an english
> version ?
>
> This is my opinion, but of course we must discuss about this :
> If we see the wikipedia contribution process, then there is one
> wiki instance for each language. The only interact is an interlang
> link between article(s).
>
> Differents versions could be, and (often) are different !
> I think we must do the same for xwiki documentation.
> Got a dirty version of the documentation is better than nothing!
>
> Vincent was talking to me about starting a french instance of
> xwiki website. I think : maybe not, this is a good idea !
> For me, french and english community of xwiki can progress on 2
> distinct ways without any problem. Sure, there will be some people
> to make bridge..
>
> What are you thinking about this ? please give us your opinion.
>
> Best regards
> Boly38
>
> NB: Vincent Massol, please correct me if i do some mistake :)
>
>
>
--
http://purl.org/net/sergiu
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