UA Wiki:Language policy

From UA Wiki

This page describes the current multi-lingual policy on the UA Wiki.

We are building a set of ICT help pages for the Universiteit Antwerpen. These should be translated to at least English and Dutch. Unfortunately, MediaWiki has no thoroughly built mechanism for creating multilingual sites yet, which is why there are a few simple rules to help with the maintenance of the wiki.

• As for MediaWiki's reference configuration, English is the root language. This means nothing more than the fact that the root pages of all documents (e.g., Wireless_networks) are English.
• Other languages should be placed in an appropriately named sub-page of the English version. E.g. the Dutch version of Wireless_networks should be at Wireless_networks/nl (not Draadloze_netwerken or Draadloze_netwerken/nl).
• Language sub-pages should be named using the appropriate language code for that language (see below).
• Sub-pages should only be used for translations into other languages, not for English content (e.g. you shouldn't use Table editing/example - use Table editing example or Example of table editing instead).
• If an international version of a page exists but an English version does not, then please create a stub article for the English version as this aids navigation.
• All pages in the help namespace should be tagged with the {{Languages}} template, which automatically creates links to all available translations.

The main page

The English version of our front page is located at Main_Page. Translated versions may be located at Main_Page/code, where code is the language code (e.g. Main_Page/nl), but none have been written so far.

Importantly, the rules about language codes (see below) should be followed here as well.

Language codes

Throughout the UA Wiki you should use the language codes specified by the MediaWiki software when creating language-specific content (see Names.php for the full and up-to-date list).