Talk:Documentation/Dashboard/Wiki Editing Policy

Martina, could you (or anyone else) give some rationales behind the policies? Some questions might be: Why should the localized content follow the same structure as the english? Why shouldn't wiki names be translated? What is the advantage of using the DISPLAYTITLE directive? How can the page be searched/found best? Why should the Country Code be on the first place (and not e.g. /Documentation/DE/...) Thanks --nino 21:35, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

A couple of answers to some good questions... --ccornell 11:18, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Why should the Country Code be on the first place (and not e.g. /Documentation/DE/...)

The rationale behind this decision was simply an attempt to group all contributions for a given language under that language's ISO code. In the DE example you get /DE as the main hub for all DE language pages. Under that DE landing page or hub, you get DE/Documentation which is all translated or original authored DE documentation. You also get... DE/FAQ and so on. Then you can apply the same to the French language pages... they are grouped under FR, and under the FR landing page or hub you get FR/Documentation and FR/FAQ and so on.

What is the advantage of using the DISPLAYTITLE directive?

The DISPLAYTITLE allows us to clean up the title shown at the top of the page. When you use sub-pages as we are doing in the OOoWiki, the Subpage title can get very very long. The DISPLAYTITLE allows us to shorten that down to something more human readable. It's a tradeoff for using sub-pages to group content. We have a shorter page title which is easier to read, but we have a page that is a little harder to link to when you are linking from another page (you have to copy the right part of the URL instead of just copying the page name).

This also allows the localized pages to have a correct localized wiki page title instead of the English title that would be shown by default. See the next question for more on why this situation happens.

How can the page be searched/found best?

You should be able to simply search on the title (or part of the title) given by the DISPLAYTITLE, and get the page back in your search results. The MediaWiki search engine is not the best... a Google Search (using the Google Search extension) will give better results. This extension is only implemented on the English Documentation page at this point. It will take some work to broaden its scope to cover other parts of the Wiki or to replace the default MediaWiki search with a Google search. Possible... but not being worked on right now.

Why should the localized content follow the same structure as the english? Why shouldn't wiki names be translated?

This simplifies the Interwiki linking (a tool that we use to link pages of one language to all other languages that page is available in). If we have different sub-page structures and page naming for localized content, we cannot easily use Templates to add in Interwiki links. It is possible to use Interwiki linking without this limitation on page naming, but then we would have to manually maintain the Interwiki linking on every page of a set of Wiki pages instead of just using a common Template to do the linking. With a single page such as Main Page, the page naming and style can be anything appropriate for the language linked to. In a Wiki Book, we want to use one Interwiki template per book, and this limits us somewhat in the page naming conventions. If we use a common naming style, the Template is simple and works effectively. If we allow free-form structure and page naming, the Interwiki linking via templates becomes impossible, and we would have to fall back on manual linking.

For an example of how this works, take a look at the Administration Guide. It is available in 4 languages. They all use the common structure and page naming. We can easily link from one language to the next on every page of the document using the "InterWiki Languages AdminGuide" Template. If a fifth language is added to the mix, no extra work is needed other than to add the language once per document to the Template, and make sure that the template call in the original English document remains (with no changes) in the new translation. Without this we would have to edit every page of the document in every language to add in the cross links to each new language... not a nice alternative.