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I thought it was high-time to introduce myself, and start the ball rolling regarding the technical issues that Fanlore has and some technical changes we would like to attempt. And, ah, after my experiment with the namespace implementation, we realised we needed to talk more thoroughly with the users of Fanlore.

So, I'm Amy, and I'm a new Fanlore staffer who was recruited to help fix some bugs and start implementing new technical functionality. Hi! Before I was a Fanlore staffer, I was a staffer on the now defunct Documentation team, and I also volunteer for Support, AD&T, and Tag Wrangling.

In good news, I have fixed what we called the TOC bug, where people not using the WordPress skin had a table of contents sprawled across the page. \o/

I've also been asked to look at implementing what are called namespaces for languages other than English on the wiki, and after the watchful gardeners got a bit confused at my experiment with one page, it was clear that we had to ask the Fanlore users about how they would like to structure pages written in other languages. English is the default language for Fanlore, but we definitely welcome translations and other pages written in other languages! This post is for just that -- how can we make pages in languages other than English accessible and translatable for the general Fanlore community? Are you happy with the status quo? Or, if not (and we'd love to hear why not), do you have ideas on how it could be improved?

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Hi! :D

Right now there are several pages about fandoms in countries other than the US or UK but just one page (that I'm aware of) that isn't written in English (and that's the one that made us go o_O when you edited it *g*). Some zine pages have non-English content in the story summaries because it a) takes time to translate that stuff and no one wanted to or b) the summaries are actually excerpts and thus in the language they were written in. These zine pages all have general descriptions in English though.

I'm used to Wikipedia, so it would be great to have some kind of automatic template thing that links to other language versions of pages (something that can be added by a user without special privileges). It would also be great to have templates requesting translations, either of articles or of specific bits of text (e.g. "Can someone please add the original language name of this series to the English language article" type requests). I find language features that work more like the stub template easier to use than request pages (where I'm more likely to feel presumptuous asking for something).

I have nothing to add except my support for the plan for a multilingual fanlore!

The first is something I'm looking in to -- Wikipedia has a bot that on noticing you've linked to one way of translation, it notices and puts in the other way of linking. Unfortunately, as is the way with these things, their documentation is woeful, and I've yet to find who to ask about a) which bot is it and b) is it available to all MediaWiki users.

I'm noting these suggestions down on a sub-page on my User Profile, so if you do think of anything else, feel free to go add to it.

Edited 2010-08-26 10:04 (UTC)

Hi! *waves*

Awesome; that sort of detailed information really helps me to try and see what tools could be useful. I've started compiling ideas on a sub-page of my User Profile, and think that what might help the pages with non-English content in summaries is some sort of 'hey, this could be translated' superscript, which would be easily enough done with a template.

Another thing that might be a translation issue is what to do with the images that get uploaded to Fanlore (more than 14,000 so far). Many of them zine covers or doujinshi and maybe it might be a good to add a translation of the text on the image (title, etc.) to the image pages of the non-English covers.

I mentioned this in the comments of the post that was locked down: I think it's necessary to translate the interface and rules before non-English content actually makes sense. Take fanfiction.net as an example. People are allowed to upload non-English content, but most potential users won't ever go there because they can't operate the interface, read the TOS or deal with mods who speak the language their stories are written in.

Edited (removed IO reference) 2010-08-26 20:49 (UTC)

Are there a lot of them with no English transliteration/translation? I went looking a while ago and mostly found things that already had a translation.

As I think you saw, I've got contacting IO on my to-do list :)

\o/ Thank you for your support!

(If you do happen to think of anything, I'm taking suggestions on a sub-page of my User Profile. Feel free to go add to it!)

Good to see you aboard! =D

And I approve of multilingual content!

When I work on French fandom pages (though articles written in English) I try to use the English title when one exists to name the page, otherwise I stick with the French one. I hope this is fine.

MediaWiki has already translated most of the wiki infrastructure, so it's more content that's the issue. And language-specific contact references to avoid the dealing with incomprehensible mods issue.

Yes, that's what we're looking at. Translating content and making it easier for speakers of a language other than English to contribute.

Thanks!

That sounds fine, also!