Re: [xwiki-users] translation of the documentation (ie. in french)

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: