TheBestLinks.com:Multilingual coordination

From TheBestLinks.com

'We use Wikipedia-L to coordinate Wikipedia across different languages. Please take a look at the Wikipedia Embassy and join if you're interested in the coordination project.

The Wikipedia community is committed to including any and all languages for which there are Wikipedians willing to do the work. We are aware that many of the world's 6,500 languages are not well-represented on computers or the web, and we are committed to working with language speakers and computing organizations to support as many languages as possible.

Each language Wikipedia currently has a separate set of user accounts. Links between articles in different languages are called interlanguage links.

The URL of the wikipedia for a given language is xx.wikipedia.org, where xx is the 2-letter language code as per ISO 639. For languages without an ISO 639 2-letter language code, the 3-letter language code is used, or if that also does not exist, a custom 3-letter language code is made. (On the mailing list and in discussion, people often write xx: to mean the xx-language wikipedia, as in I'm a regular on fr:.)

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Table of contents

1 Encyclopedia projects 1.1 Other projects 1.2 Related projects 2 Starting a new language wikipedia 3 Statistics 4 Policy issues 4.1 Some questions you might ask 4.2 Anything else?

Encyclopedia projects

See m:Complete list of language wikis available on Meta-Wikipedia for a full list.

Wiki encyclopedias that are at least somewhat active have been started in various languages:

1. Afrikaans - started on November 16, 2001
2. Albanian (Shqip) - translated language file, six articles as of December 16, 2003
3. Alsatian (Els�ssisch) - started on November 13, 2003
4. Arabic (عربي) Started on July, 2003. Currently in initial stages of content building - Isam
5. Aromanian (Arm�neashti) (http://roa-rup.wikipedia.org) - started on May 27, 2004
6. Bangla (বাংলা) - (Started January 27, 2004 [১৪ মাঘ, ১৪১০ বঙ্গাব্দ])
7. Basque (Euskara) - (translation in progress, see m:Azal)
8. Belarusian (Беларуская) Started on August 12, 2004.
9. Bosnian (Bosanski) - started on December 12, 2002 (created out of the Serbocroatian (Srpskohrvatski))
10. Bulgarian (Български) - started on August 3, 2003
11. Catalan (Català)
12. Chinese (简/繁 中文汉字体 簡/繁 中文漢字體) - started in May 2001, Main page made on November 16, 2002
13. Corsican (Corsu) - started on December 9, 2003
14. Croatian (Hrvatski) (created out of the Serbocroatian (Srpskohrvatski))
15. Czech (Český) - started on May 3, 2002
16. Danish (Dansk) - started on February 1, 2002
17. Dutch (Nederlands) - started on August 31, 2001
18. English - started on January 2001
19. Esperanto - started on November 15, 2001
20. Estonian (Eesti) - started on August 24, 2002
21. Faroese (F�royskt) - started on December 2003
22. Finnish (Suomi) - started on February 21, 2002
23. French (Français) - started on March 23 2001
24. Frisian (Frysk) - started on September 2, 2002
25. Galician (Galego)
26. German (Deutsch) - started on May 2001
27. Greek (Ελληνικά) - December 1, 2002
28. Gujarati
29. Hebrew (עברית) - started on July 8, 2003
30. Hindi (हिन्दी) - started on July 11, 2003
31. Hungarian (Magyar) - started on July 8, 2003
32. Icelandic (�slensk)
33. Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) - started on November 7, 2003
34. Interlingua - started on April 29, 2002
35. Irish (Gaeilge) - started on June 7, 2003
36. Italian (Italiano) - started on 2001
37. Japanese (日本語)
38. Javanese (Basa Jawa) - started on March 7, 2004
39. Kashubian (Kaszëbsczi) - started on April 1, 2004
40. Khmer (ភាសាខ្មែរ)- started on June 30, 2004
41. Klingon (tlhIngan Hol) - started on May 27, 2004
42. Korean (Hangukeo) - started on October 12, 2002
43. Kurdish (Kurdî) - started on January 7, 2004
44. Latin (Latina) - started on May 22, 2002
45. Luxembourgish (L�tzebuergesch) - started July 2004
46. Latvian (Latviešu) - started on June 2003
47. Lithuanian (Lietuviškai) - started on February 19, 2003
48. Lojban (la lojban) - started on August 8 2004
49. Low Saxon (Plattdüütsch / platt / niederdeusch / plautdietsch) - started on April 27, 2003
50. Nahuatl started on August 10, 2003
51. Nauruan (Nauruose) - started on August 9, 2003
52. Taiwanese (Hō-ló-oē; zh-min-nan-TW), called Holopedia at Wikipedia - started 30 July, 2003
53. Malay (Bahasa Melayu) - started on August 12, 2003
54. Malayalam
55. Mongolian -started on February 29,2004
56. Marathi
57. Norwegian (Norsk) - started on November 26, 2001
58. Occitan (Occitan) - started on October 20, 2003
59. Polish (Polska) - started on September 26, 2001
60. Portuguese (Português)
61. Persian (http://fa.wikipedia.com) started on January, 2004
62. Romanian (Rom�nă) - started on June 19 2003
63. Russian (Русский) started on December 2002
64. Sanskrit started June 2004
65. Serbocroatian (Sprskohrvatski) (now separated into a Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian version)
66. Serbian (Srpski) (created out of the Serbocroatian (Srpskohrvatski))
67. Simple English
68. Slovak (po slovensky) - August 13, 2003
69. Slovenian (Slovensko) - started on March 8, 2002
70. Sotho
71. Spanish (Castellano)- started on May 20, 2001
72. Swahili (Kiswahili)
73. Swedish (Svenska) - started on June 3, 2001
74. Tamil (தமிழ்) - started on September 30, 2003
75. Thai (ไทย) - started December 2003.
76. Tatar (Tatarça) - started on September 15, 2003
77. Turkish (Türkçe) -December 2, 2002
78. Ukrainian (Українська)
79. Urdu (اردو)
80. Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) - restarted on November 12, 2003
81. Volapük - restarted on January 27, 2004
82. Walloon (Walon) (http://wikipedia.walon.org)
83. Welsh (Cymraeg) - started on March 15, 2003
84. Yiddish (ייִדיש) - started on March 13, 2004

For the name Wikipedia in these languages, with raster image, see m:Wikipedia raster name.

See also m:Locales for the Wikipedia Software

Other projects

There are other, non-Wikimedia, free Wiki-based encyclopedia projects independent of Wikipedia:

• Enciclopedia Libre (http://enciclopedia.us.es/) - Spanish (Castellano)
• Викизнание (http://www.wikiznanie.ru) - Russian (Русский)
• Susning.nu (http://susning.nu/) - Swedish (Svenska)

Related projects

• Wikipedia Machine Translation Project

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Starting a new language wikipedia

See Wikipedia:Create a new language in Wikipedia for a tutorial on how to get a Wikipedia in your language running.

A certain amount of "critical mass" is necessary in order for a wiki to "take off". Without 5-10 people eagerly writing and arguing and playing with each other, it wouldn't be as much fun. So we encourage anyone who wants to build a wiki in their own language to also go out and announce/recruit for it. :-)

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Statistics

See Wikipedia:Multilingual statistics for a more complete overview.

As of November 1, 2003, the number of non-English language articles increased to over 50% of the total number, probably for the first time. This is an encouraging sign in favour of linguistic diversity.

As of February 18, 2004, the English language wikipedia had 209,637 articles, while the next 19 had 261,352 on this date, i.e. the number of non-English language articles was more than 55% of the total. The 2nd to 9th languages (de, ja, fr, pl, sv, nl, es, da) together had 210,448 articles, together matching the number of articles in the English language version.

As of May 6, 2004, the English language wikipedia had 261,003 articles, and the 2nd to 8th languages (de 86,269, ja 46,443, fr 35,481, pl 29,209, sv 28,260, nl 27,008, es 22,593) together had 275,263 articles, together matching the number of articles in the English language version. The Chinese (hanyu - zh) wikipedia more than doubled from February 18 to May 6 - from 4,395 to 9,457 entries.

As of 1 September 2004, the English language wikipedia had 337,8083 articles, and the 2nd to 7th languages (de 134,190, ja 68,746, fr 50,489, sv 38,637, pl 37,061, nl 34,662) together had 363,785 articles, together matching the number of articles in the English language version.

The 20 largest Wikipedias (July 15, 2004):

1. English (305133)
2. German (Deutsch) (114250)
3. Japanese (日本語) (59283)
4. French (Français) (43703)
5. Swedish (Svenska) (34169)
6. Polish (Polska) (33879)
7. Dutch (Nederlands) (31082)
8. Spanish (Español) (25018)
9. Danish (Dansk) (19346)
10. Italian (Italiano) (16618)
11. Esperanto (13382)
12. Chinese (简/繁中文汉字体 簡/繁 中文漢字體) (11671)
13. Portuguese (10781)
14. Hebrew (עברית) (7975)
15. Bulgarian (7276)
16. Norwegian (7070)
17. Catalan (Català) (7064)
18. Romanian (Română) (7031)
19. Finnish (Suomi) (6993)
20. Ukrainian (5070)

For an overview of the world's biggest wiki websites (Wikipedia or not), see MeatBall:BiggestWiki.

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Policy issues

Some questions you might ask

What can I do to help?

• Please consult Wikipedia Embassy
• Consider joining Wikipedia-L, the international mailing list
• Just jump through interlanguage links
• Add yourself to the global and local lists of translators.
• See m:Multilingualism for Wikimedia-wide coordination

I have just noticed the fact that the top and bottom bars are in English. Can something be done about that?

• Those lines come from a configuration file that the public can't access (I believe). Please see the embassy and the technical mailing list for the ongoing effort to translate Wikipedia into different languages.

Here are some "international Wikipedia" policy questions. To a certain extent, these questions will resolve themselves, though.

• How are the various Wikipedias going to be coordinated, if at all? Will we have several quite different articles in different languages? Will English be a lingua franca?
  • In the embassy we are coordinating efforts between languages.

• Is there going to be an easy way to link from one language to another?
  • Yes, Interlanguage links are now available for all wikis.
• Please explain the steps to join Wikipedia with a language not in the current development list - e.g. allocation of a wiki space and hosting vs. having own domain for the national wikipedia; initial setup of the pages to be translated; promotion strategies to be adhered to, etc.? Who is in charge for this?
  • See how to create a new language in Wikipedia for an explanation.

Anything else?

• Is there any place to find a list of *all* mediawiki sites? Why do barely-active languages like Manx appear on lists like the wikistats (http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm) page? etc, etc. +sj+ 13:57, 2004 Mar 14 (UTC)

• How can I write text in non-Latin texts, what I mean to say is, is there a standard program or something? If anyone knows, please let me know in my My Talk Page. Thanks ThaGrind 10:29, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

• User:Bst translated one of the tutorial pages into Macedonian. I'm not quite sure what Bst had in mind at the time, and the text was removed as not belonging in the English Wikipedia, but should anyone ever start a Wikipedia in Macedonian, his work is available in the page history of Wikipedia:Tutorial (Editing). Isomorphic 15:24, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

See also Main Pages Gallery (http://eza.gemm.nl/Wikipedia/Gallery/Gallery.htm)

• I wanna be a sysop in Turkish. Should I apply in Turkish pages or in English pages?

cs:Wikipedie:Mezinárodní Wikipedie de:Wikipedia:Liste der Wikipedias in anderen Sprachen el:Βικιπαίδεια:Πολύγλωσσος συντονισμός eo:Internacia Vikipedio es:Wikipedia:Coordinaci�n pluriling�e fr:Wikipédia:Coordination multilangues hi:विकिपीडिया:Multilingual coordination ja:Wikipedia:多言語プロジェクトとしてのウィキペディア lb:Wikipedia:Multisproocheg minnan:Wikipedia:Kî-tha ê gí-giân nl:Wikipedia:Statistieken pl:Wikipedia:Koordynacja międzyjęzykowa ro:Wikipedia:Coordonare multilinguală sv:Wikipedia:Statistik vi:Wikipedia:Bằng nhiều thứ tiếng

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