Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination

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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.

TRANSLATION DEPARTMENT

Translations into English Quick translation needed Babel: user templates Translators Featured articles in other languages Multilingual coordination Interwiki link checker

RELATED REGIONAL PROJECTS

German translation Vienna-related translations Polish translation Spanish translation

Each language Wikipedia currently has a separate set of user accounts. Links between articles in different languages are called interlanguage links or (colloquially and a bit ambiguously) "interwiki".

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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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:List of Wikipedias on Meta-Wikipedia for a full list.

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

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 - Spanish (Castellano)
• Викизнание - Russian (Русский)
• Susning.nu - Swedish (Svenska)
• Shuda.ta - Taiwan (!@#|\@^*)

Related projects

• Wikipedia Machine Translation Project
• Wikipedia:Spanish Translation of the Week
• Translation of the week

Starting a new language wikipedia

See meta:How to start a new 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.

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 that 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 337,808 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.

As of 4 October 2004, the English language wikipedia had 362,104 articles, and the 2nd to 6th languages (de 148,462, ja 75,969, fr 55,608, sv 42,172, pl 40,178) together had 362,389 articles, together matching the number of articles in the English language version.

Since the (en) share of articles on 1 October 2004 was 34.749% and decreased by 0.93% from one month previously, and since over the 12 months previous to this it has been losing an average of slightly over 1% per month, we could have expected that it would probably fall below the 1/3 mark (33.333%) by the end of November, and very likely by the end of 2004. This eventually happened sometime in January 2005. Indeed, the decrease of the (en) share of articles slowed down markedly between October 2004 and April 2005 and was only 2.6% in this period (0.43% per month).

The 25 largest Wikipedias (July 29, 2005):

1. English (658311)
2. German (Deutsch) (265380)
3. French (Français) (140628)
4. Japanese (日本語) (131584)
5. Swedish (Svenska) (92020)
6. Dutch (Nederlands) (82150)
7. Polish (Polska) (78282)
8. Portuguese (Português) (59894)
9. Spanish (Español) (57841)
10. Italian (Italiano) (53696)
11. Chinese (中文) (35256)
12. Norwegian (Norsk) (31285)
13. Finnish (Suomi) (28265)
14. Danish (Dansk) (26799)
15. Russian (Русский) (26782)
16. Esperanto (26470)
17. Hebrew (24603)
18. Ukrainian (Українська) (19186)
19. Bulgarian (Български) (17119)
20. Catalan (Català) (15856)
21. Slovenian (Slovenščina) (14987)
22. Hungarian (Magyar) (13927)
23. Slovak (Slovenčina) (13698)
24. Czech (Česká) (12950)
25. Romanian (Română) (12727)

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

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.

• Why are the Wikipedias in different languages separate? I.E. why is a separate account and identity required for each language? It seems to me to make more sense if a Wikipedian had the same identity in all Wikipedias. If I already have a user account in the English Wikipedia, and wish to contribute to another language under my name, why do I need to open up yet another account (with a password and cookie)?

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 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)

• It depends on your operating system. In recent versions of Windows, you just need to enable the appropriate input languages by going to the Regional options control panel. For some languages such as Arabic, Hindi, and Thai, you may have to enable complex text support. Then switch the text input language. Recent Linux operating systems are usually set up for a very wide variety of languages, so you may just have to switch the text input language. - Taxman ^Talk 22:26, 31 October 2005 (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

• I wanna be a sysop in Turkish. Should I apply in Turkish pages or in English pages?
• You should apply in the Turkish Wikipedia because if you did so in the English Wikipedia, you will become an admin in the English wiki but not the Turkish wiki. Scott Gall 01:07, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• I have access to professional translating software. The results are not perfect but they are fast. Should I just use the regular Babel templates or would it be usefull to make a distiction between human and AI translations? --Tandarts 22:17, 12 July 2005 (UTC)-- 22:14, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
• At the WP:TIE it says: "Never user machine translation." It always needs to be redone completely, at least the ones I have seen so far. If you have already posted machine-translations or are going to try it anyway, please list it here: WP:PNT, so someone can clean it up. --Fenice 06:15, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

• I remember I've seen somewhere on wikipedia pages, that there is possibillity for learners of a foreing language to translate an article to the language they are learning and then some another wikipedian - native speaker - would check their translation. Unfortunately, I can't find it now.

If you know something about this, please write a reply here. Thanks in advance! --Kompik 12:26:13, 2005-07-30 (UTC)

• I was asking about this project: Wikiversity Translation practice course. (If this is not the appropriate place for a question like this, just delete it somebody.)--Kompik 11:21:29, 2005-07-31 (UTC)

• Is there one place to find lists of templates, pages, and terms in each language, on one page? For example, I am looking for the templates for {{doppelganger}} in each language, so I can protect some non-English accounts from impersonators. Is there a page where I can find this template, and see a list of its counterparts in various languages? Or, for instance, a list of links to Administrator Noticeboards, or Vandalism in Progress pages, all listed on one page for all languges? Thanks. paul klenk ^talk 19:00, 3 October 2005 (UTC)