Thread:Yatalu/@comment-15636815-20151012194734/@comment-4142476-20151013162500

I've discussed this issue with someone from the English Community Support team (Bert) because it's quite a complex topic, so writing another response to add his input.

Bert pointed out that my last point "Editing would no longer be as easy" actually weighs as probably the most important point in my explanation. Users who don't understand transclusion or langSwitch, would have no idea where to find the page they need to edit; the majority of editors are also content editors and not code editors.

Not only that, but as you said your templates are already complex, and having to internationalize them would require a lot of nested templates, with langSwitch within those already complex templates (very hard for users to translate!) or templates within templates so that langSwitch is used on the template pages. Your templating would suddenly be two/three levels of transclusion and a whole lot more work to maintain them in all these languages.

Additionally, he also brought up an extra topic: Wikia's future on mobile devices. If you visit Community Central sometimes, you'll notice that Wikia's been investing a lot of time in developing on the mobile platform (mobile main page, etc.), because over half of its visits are currently from mobile devices.

Mobile-friendliness is especially going to be hard to maintain with a very complex wiki that wants to support multiple languages, especially if your templates are complicated too. Additionally, any potential mobile application can be difficult to develop because your wiki wouldn't work like regular wikis. And if you'd have to pick a language for a mobile app for your wiki, would you pick English?

You would be missing out on options like this, and therefore Wikia also advises against doing the kind of localization that we have on WLB wiki.

On another note, I also wanted to add that with our project, I think that depending on the language, we might have some people who are willing to translating one or two articles here and there too. We also have members who are proficient in HTML/CSS/JS, and so on. If you want some help starting up your non-English wikis or (if such wiki becomes inactive) reviving them, you can always call out for help to us.