If you’ve been to the main page of the wiki in the last two hours or so, you’ll have noticed the shiny new “In other languages” box at the top of the page.

All of the translated versions of the main page that I could find that seemed remotely up to date were added to that template. There’s other translations of this page on the wiki, but they haven’t been touched since the transfer from MoinMoin.

So: instead of doing anything related to my goals at Red Hat, I decided that today would be a great day to fix the fact that we don’t have a standard way to do translations on the website. We have current instructions that contains a lot of old cruft from MoinMoin and uses a lot of MediaWiki features in a way that can be bettered.

I borrowed some template code from meta.wikimedia.org — big ups and shouts out to all the folks over at Meta-Wiki who produced those templates.

Quick summary of how it works:

• Add {{autolang|base=yes}} to the top of the English version of a page, save
• Click the set up link for the lang box, don’t touch the pre-filled code, and hit save
• Click [edit] and add the language codes for the page’s translations, save
• Click the red links to create the pages, adding {{autolang}} to the top of each one

The full details, which you should read if you’re interested in doing this, are over at [[FedoraProject:Translating]] (or if you like neat shortcuts, you can remember [[FP:LANG]]).

An email has been sent to trans@ to get suggestions from translators within the project and see if there’s anything we need to fix/improve. You can also provide your suggestions as comments to this blog.

As a bonus for reading this whole blog post, here’s some comments my blog’s spam collector caught that I thought were funny: one two three four

mw now has a working commit command.

Go find a bug for me, please.

I failed.

After talking with Jesus M. Rodriguez for an hour or so, we both determined that FUSE is not the right way to go about this for what I want to accomplish. The only thing we were planning to use FUSE for so far was downloading the wiki pages; everything else would be done with helper scripts.

We discussed things like “pull” and “commit”. It started to sound like a bastardized VCS. So we wrote a bastardized VCS. :)

Introducing mw: a command-line program with subcommands like “fetch” and “commit” to work with MediaWiki installations. I spent all day creating the framework for commands and all sorts of things, and ended up creating the init and fetch commands to start a mw repo and fetch some pages.

Currently: useless. Future: promising. I’m hoping that I can get the committing portion ready to roll within the week, and have fetch get all the pages of wikis and categories soonish.

Some key awesomeness: attempts to merge instead of just giving up (haha, you suck, MediaWiki), unified diffs, logs, and anything you really feel like doing.

Clone it now and read the README and HACKING:

git clone git://github.com/ianweller/mw.git

Edit: If you want to discuss this with me at FUDCon tomorrow, by all means do. Ping me on IRC to see where I’m at. :)