Talk: Suggestions/I18n template

I LOVE this idea! — Powersurge360Violencia 03:14, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

My suggestion for a place for interwiki language links and such would be in that bottom section of the page outside the content, where there is the rating, permalink, and sharing links. Since that is really part of the skin (Monaco only afaik) I would suggest putting such links there. Perhaps some wikia people can help us look into it. —♥Jedi♥Rogue♥ 17:45, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

It's a nice idea in theory, and I'd be all in favor of it if there were more complete wikis of other languages. The problem is that the other language wikis are woefully incomplete. Most of them have a home page that consists mostly of red links. The French one is better, but even that is completely missing some very major articles. For example, Ring of Fire, Raisu Palace, and Jennur's Horde were all edited so much here as to need a massive trimming, but on the French wiki, the articles don't even exist. I would not want to see a bunch of red links added all over the wiki to foreign language pages that don't exist. I guess it could probably be implemented to not add the links at all for most pages, but that would make the formatting look rather inconsistent. Quizzical 01:43, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I've read some talk on wikia (maybe connected with the transforms wiki) that the Monaco design changed the list of foreign language links in the sidebar to a dropdown because so few people were actually using it. The German GuildWiki actually indexes the english names for most things, so you can install their search plugin to your toolbar and quickly find the article you need that way. (Not that you'd want to, chances that you'll find more info than here are slim.) If PAGENAME can be used in the customization template for monaco (where you can change the nav links in your sidebar), it might be possible to add a GWW link easily, but don't count on me doing that because I'm sticking with Monobook for the time being. --◄mendel► 07:54, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Official wiki[]

Could we also get a link to the official wiki article..? -{[ PUL ]}- 09:50, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

That would perhaps make sense if the official wiki also gives a link to the article here. Quizzical 19:54, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

There exists a JavaScript function to create links to Guild Wars Wiki that you can put into your own .js file (it's actually modified from a function written for Guild Wars Wiki that creates a link to GuildWiki). I don't think we'd really need it on a site-wide basis, but if enough people asked for it, we probably could implement it. —Dr Ishmael

20:19, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Clarifications[]

I'm getting back here a little late but better late dans never.

The thing is, some of you misunderstood the way that interlanguage links works. They do not produce any red links (because it can't know if the page exist or not so no red links). But the first thing is that we dont add interwiki to page that dont exist. It would be stupid. People who said thoses things dont seems to know how interlanguage links works on the big Wikipedia.

Second thing, it can't be your job to do thoses things unless you can switch language of your game to see what are the correct names of things. And even if you would, in french, for exemple, we have a lot more things that are called the same than in english (due to poor translators). Plus, translations of the game seems to change a lot more than english.

And yes, on Monaco (wich i use) interlanguage links are in a drop down and this make impossible to open interlanguage links in new tab or windows. So, Wikia is thinking about making a new preference to let users control how Monaco interlanguage links will be shown.

On Monobook, interlanguage link are listed at bottom of the left column like on Wikipedia. You just have to insert [[fr:Gwen (Héros)]] at end of Gwen (GW:EN) article to link to the french wiki. The placements of thoses links is handled by the software. Interlanguage links never show up in the article; they are a special kind of interwikis links. So, that is why we have a few lang_xx parameters in all of our template on fr.guildwars. Thoses parameters are then passed to the I18n template. But that template could be used as is on any page or on page with fewer other language equivalent, the interlanguage links can be added without the use of any template.

Feel free to ask any question needed. — Tulip Vorlax 08:56, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh and i forgot to talk about the way of thinking of some people here who think that because other wikia about GuildWars are so incompleted that they don't deserved GuildWiki linking to them.

The thing is, if the others languages wikia about GW are so incomplete it's simply that no one know they exist.

On fr.guildwars.wikia.com, we currently are only 3 contributing users (how many users did it take to make the 16k articles here ?). So, maybe if some article that seems so important to GuildWiki users don't exist, it's just because there's no user who know enough about the subject to write a good article. Because, you know, we have to write every article from zero here. We can't translate GuildWiki article; we are not in the same license. But we could translate the official wiki articles (if we state the source).

A few weeks ago i asked the Anet guy who is "in charge" of the french community if we could make like official the "news" that was saying it was most likely they would never do other languages wikis for GW'1; he replied no (in a lot more words). Maybe if he would have replied yes i would have next ask them if they would be kind enough to do us (the french wikia) a bit of publicity somehow. But there's a big chance that they would had refused since we are hosted by Wikia.

So, for most other wikia hosted wikis about Guild Wars here it's a sort of vicious cycle; we have too few articles so poeple dont want to loose their precious time helping out. We have to few contrbutors so nobody thing we have done a wonderfull work and deserve to be linked to.

Maybe you should consider linking to non wikia hosted wikis then ? They have more users and a little less articles but they are on the same license as you. — Tulip Vorlax 21:38, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Some questions:

Is there anything that needs to be changed in the setup of this wiki, or can you start adding the fr: links now?
What articles in your wiki have the same names as ours (monsters? skills?) so that the interlanguage links can be added automatically by the templates we already use?
Why do you want a template? To have a category for pages that have an interlanguage link? Why do you need that?

--◄mendel► 07:01, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

I can answer the last one, it's mostly because this wiki is the most famous within the community, even within those of speakers of foreign languages. I've had a few people in the guilds frustrated because of a limited understanding of the English. This makes this wiki, through the association of foreign wikis, more accessible and useful to the community at large. I definitely vote towards the inclusion of the template on EVERY page, including those that do not exist in foreign wikis to foster growth among the other wikis. If the question is "why a template" not "why do this at all" then the answer is fairly obvious. To ease the transition. — Powersurge360Violencia 07:06, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Obviously I need to clarify that. To add interlangugae links, a template is not needed - just add the [[fr: thing that Tulip mentions. The only thing the I18n template on the french wiki does beyond that is to place the article in a category for "has interlanguage link" for the language. I do not understand why that is necessary, and if it's not, we don't need that template - we can simply add the interlangugae hints to have it work (see my first question, though). --◄mendel► 08:11, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

I think we could do a template that links to the other languages either plugged into the sidebar (beast info, item info, et cetera) or a box on the bottom that says something a long the lines of "View this page in foreign languages: XXXX, YYYYY" where xxxx and yyyy says "French Wiki" or "German Wiki" and the link goes to the counterpart. That wouldn't take a terrible lot of coding, would it?

That being said, alot of the problem with the wiki being empty can be solved with an autotranslator, in that even though it translates it into broken <language>, the information is there to be made grammatically correct by the contributors. It's alot easier to correct an article than to collect the information and write one from scratch, if you follow my logic. — Powersurge360Violencia 08:20, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Fr Wiki mayn't copy over our info. They must start from scratch, or from GWWiki articles. Thus the autotranslator is out. Sorry :< ---

-- (s)talkpage 10:26, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

You know what? Fuck that license crap. The spirit of Creative Commons is sharing, isn't it? Not to mention that the only party who could sue/complain about their breaking of the license would be us, the GuildWiki community, and are we really going to care enough to do that? We have the license to protect us from malicious copying or misuse of our information, not to hinder the people with good intentions. —Dr Ishmael

13:56, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Why? I've seen a copy of our wiki before, but it did list the user contributions and such... Is that the big barring reason why we can't, lack of the list of contributions. And, if so, can we do something similar to what PvX did? — Powersurge360Violencia 13:58, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Mendel, you're misunderstanding the point of the auto-categories - they're in the "else" clause of the #if statement, and translate as "Page without bond towards the X site", meaning the article doesn't have a corresponding article in the X-language wiki. It's like our now-obsolete Category:Skills missing concise description, it's to see where information is lacking and needs to be added.

PS, interlanguage links are automatically placed in the sidebar, like on our main page. Monobook puts them in a <div>, while Monaco puts them in a listbox.

The biggest problem I see with implementing this is adding the template to every single page in mainspace, which, although it could be botted, would still be a lot of work. I will volunteer my CPU cycles to run AWB, if we decide to go ahead with it. —Dr Ishmael

13:47, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

You are right about the "else". It makes no sense to add the template to every page in mainspace, especially as the links still need to be added. We can periodically make a list of pages that have no interlanguage links if we need to. What does make sense is for all wikis to get together and set up a correspondence database that works with frames or some such; we'd get a navbar across the top that displays links to the available articles from gww, gw, pvxwiki, fr.guildwars.wikia. gwiki.fr, and so forth - there'd be icons for that, and links to create a page on the wiki in question. It makes no sense to add interlanguage links to every wiki out there, especially as many of those are just going to be the same going backwards. We have 5000 monsters and 1500(?) skills in the game, that accounts for a lot of links that need to be set up only once.

If the database for all this is to be a wiki, the question is if it could be a wikia wiki, because no matter whether we'd use frames or some javascript to display the links, we'd probably list the nav pages with "action=render", that is, without any skin applied.

That said, the gwiki.fr has our license, and it looks stunning, especially from a technical perspective - very good use of automation, both with the skill description popups and the use of DPL to generate pages. --◄mendel► 14:50, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

The license does not prohibit copying content from one part of the wiki to another, does it? It certainly doesn't prohibit moving pages. Could we declare the other language wikis to effectively be part of this one, and then allow translations for that reason? There are some things that should not be directly translated, of course. Plug a skill name into Babelfish and what it outputs might not match what the French edition of Guild Wars uses.

As far as getting contributors to the other language wikis, it may well be too late for that. Even the official wiki is somewhat lacking in content, despite heavy publicity from ArenaNet, as few want to put a bunch of work into an essentially new wiki so long after release. Wait more than a year later than when the official wiki got its start, and restrict to a language spoken by far fewer players, and the situation is much, much worse. Quizzical 16:33, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

@mendel: Why would we need frames or javascript to display the interlanguage links, when MediaWiki already places them in their own box? —Dr Ishmael

16:50, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

I am assuming we strive for crosslinking about 10 or more wikis. That means we'd have to add 10 crosslinks to each article on each wiki (10x10=100 edits) - or put the 10 crosslinks on a central server. --◄mendel► 17:43, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I think I get what you're saying - we need Javascript to interface between the database and the individual wikis. Get the list of foreign-language articles for the current PAGENAME, insert them into the page as interlanguage links, and let MediaWiki handle them from there. Something like that? —Dr Ishmael

17:52, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that's the general idea - except that I'd like to have them someplace where I can middle-click a few of them. Now where could we put a row of icons ...? --◄mendel► 18:28, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Heya! Not sure where to put this, so I'll just add it to the bottom. Mendel asked me to take a look at this and just to clarify one point--we can set up interlanguage linking with other Wikia wikis if any are missing from the interwiki map; however, right now we can't do it for external wikis. In looking at the table on the suggestion article, it seems like a large number of the most popular foreign language wikis are hosted outside of Wikia; I'm not sure if that would influence your decision, but I wanted to let you know how it works. --KyleH (talk) 00:14, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, can we do it with Javascript somehow? We'd do a

<div id=language>
* [[gww:Main Page|official]]
* [[http://www.guildwiki.de/wiki/Hauptseite|deutsch]]
</div>

which we set to display:none with our common.css, and the javascript just grabs the links and stuffs them into the language dropdown. (Do we need to add [[en:{{fullpagename}}]] to that div to make the dropdown appear? What about monobook?) And of course to create that div, we'd best use a template. Sigh.

We put the display:none into the .css so that we can write css for other skins (or private css) to insert "Language links:" at the start of the section and actually display it at the bottom of the article, if so desired. I can imagine that this is useful for people who want to edit these links, as they don't have to check the page source or open the dropdown to see whether that page is already linked, and where it links to. --◄mendel► 00:44, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

If we use JS... we could try putting a div like you suggest on each page, populate it with actual links to other wikis (instead of the standard interlanguage links), then do listdiv = getElementById(language), parse the listdiv to get the links, then append them to pdiv = getElementById(p-lang) (Monobook's "in other languages" box) or wdiv = getElementById(103_wg) (Monaco's "Languages" dropdown list). —Dr Ishmael

19:43, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

So we seem to have a working concept, now all we need is a volunteer to implement that? --◄mendel► 23:11, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Clarifications 2 : Second round[]

Hi all,

Sorry for not returning here sooner. I tend to easilly get mad for nothing and i didn't wanted to ruin this.

There's still a lot of tiny things you dont understand. The template used by others templates to manage interlanguage links does not put page in a category UNLESS they are MISSING the name of the page for a perticular language. And that feature might not be needed on GuildWiki because you have a lot more users...

Why is this template needed ? Because name of say, skills or weapons, in every others [supported] languages, should be integrated in the skill template (or object template) as a new parameter that does nothing if empty. It's the standard template who call the interlanguage one. For pages that don't use thoses kind of template could call directly the interlanguage template but since there's a bug change that no page on the same subject exist in other language it would be better to not use it.

Another thing that was unclear is that interlanguage links were already set up for every Wikia hosted wikis that Guild Wars is the topic. Nothing needed to be changing.

Now,about the desire that many of you expressed of having links to wikis outside Wikia; let me just say this : I don't care ! No, don't be chocked. I think it's good idea but it was not the matter of this proposal. You can have all interwikis links you want. I could even help ya, although cant think of a proper way or placement for them. They could used the new parameters introduced in the standard templates. But, we all know it's not me who would do all this work. I only know french then english.

Feel free to contact me more directly if i take too much time returning here [again]. (By the way, i did not read all previous responses, sorry) — Tulip Vorlax 03:10, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Ok, let's check if I understand you correctly:

You can add interwiki links (to fr.guildwars.wikia.com) to our articles right now, but you haven't done that yet.
You want the interwiki links to be displayed in our infoboxes under some circumstances. The German GuildWiki puts them to the right of the article title (example).

I support using an internationalisation template here, because we can link to whereever we want. We ought to figure out where to place the link, and I strongly support putting it in the same place on each page. For example, we can do it like German GuildWiki or, if we consistently keep the template at the bottom of the page, use a box like the categories have. In addition, we can use some CSS classes to turn the display off by default and tell users how to turn it on for themselves (or vice versa).

I support asking Wikia to upgrade our Wiki to the new parser, which will allow us to categorise all pages that do have a given language link into a hidden category for that language; pages that don't have links can then be found easily via a DPL query or the database dump. --◄mendel► 18:47, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Again, sorry to not comming here as oftem as i shoud.

Interlanguages link are never handle by the software (Mediawiki) like other interwikis links. All languages links are already grouped together in a place determined by the skin in use. On Monaco it is like this :

Ok, the syntax [[:fr:name of page]] can be used (i think) so it really produce a link where you want it. But normally, interlanguages links are in that box.

The use of the I18n template is so, per exemple, the object template would have have a few more paremeters that will be passed directly to the I18n template. That was made like this on w:c:fr.guildwars so it was more easilly handled by the 3 top contributing users and that it would also made thing simple for new users. GuildWiki might not need to proceed like this. You have tons of users. But, aren't they most of them natives english people who mostly dont know names of GuildWars things in others languages ?

I already put [[fr:name of page]] on a few GuildWiki pages like Treasure Hunter‎, Dragon Festival 2008‎ and Amulet of the Mists‎. And Rieke Hain added them to the main page not long after the move to Wikia. I was a bit wondering was this had been unnoticed for so long and i though GuildWikian would have put them everywhere.. But maybe too many users moved over to the Official.... — Tulip Vorlax 04:49, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

I am going to make a template (today, or in the next 7 days, I hope) that displays links to the most active wikis on the page itself, possibly with an option for users to turn on other links in their CSS. If you have list like these — [1] [2] [3] [4] — that would be really handy, and I would then add all links for them for you automatically. Or I could use a current pages dump of a wiki that has the links, how far along are you on fr.guildwars.wikia? --◄mendel► 09:12, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

You gave me a great idea...

I'm not sure of the meaning of your last sentence, sorry. — Tulip Vorlax 14:12, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Ok, so, now i've done a template on fr.guildwars that take profit of the fact that translations are includes in the template for every skill, objet, etc. Just like we have a skill template and a skill line (row) template, i've made a skill lang. It simply make a table row with a link to GuildWiki and an internal french link. Could have link on all (in fact i'll add them right away, will be usefull). The table is there [5]

Next step, finding how i could use DPL to make the rows appear by themselves. But i fear it will sort it by french name instead of english.

By the way, localized names of skills are on official wiki : [[6]]. Dont know if we can use it since it's not same license (it's ok on fr.guildwars), but thoses pages are just stating facts and there no copyright on facts, just on the way they're presented. — Tulip Vorlax 15:09, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

The translation list on the official wiki is going to be very helpful, thank you. --◄mendel► 19:03, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

There seems to be a problem on fr.guildwars with DPL or with our categories. I've ask for help on central. — Tulip Vorlax 16:20, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Problem solved (i think). This first list is only preliminary stuff, ultimately there will be many other lists for skills, object and quests.

Thoses things will be usefull to us too. I didn't know it was missing so much english links... — Tulip Vorlax 01:09, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

GuildWiki

Talk: Suggestions/I18n template

Contents

Official wiki[]

Clarifications[]

Clarifications 2 : Second round[]

See also[]