Thread:Yatalu/@comment-15636815-20151012194734/@comment-15636815-20151013234707

First, it appears you possibly misunderstand what I meant about translating templates. What I meant was what you said in this statement:"'Either or you would have to make foreign versions of the template anyway, as would've been the case when you duplicate the template on another wiki and translate it over there.'"I never envisioned (or even considered!) the idea of using dozens, hundreds, or billions of cases of LangSwitch within our templates. Just reading your description of it is likely to give me nightmares for most of a week. ;-)

On the other hand, I should have. You're right; that's exactly what we'd need to do. *shudder*

Your arguments and Bert's arguments are very persuasive, and the two of you have convinced me that separate sites are the way to go. Therefore, I will make no further attempts to persuade you to hold my opinion. I do, though, wish to respond to a few of your comments, simply to promote understanding for both you and me.

Request that the founder of the non-EN wikia give admin rights to one of the EN admins That is probably the best idea imaginable. I'm embarrassed that I never thought of it. It helps the new founder/admin by allowing that individual to concentrate on translation instead of the structure and format and the content. It also helps the EN wikia because we know that the non-EN wikia will have a good starting point that provides essentially the same information as the original site. As you mentioned, the new founder should feel free to deviate from the EN structure as he/she sees fit.

"Other-language wikis also are unique projects, not duplicates of their English version" True, as I noted above. Even so, two non-English versions of our site already exist. Both of them have made attempts to duplicate our content with language as the only difference. One of them almost looks like a twin site! In spite of this, though, content growth is poor on those sites. I realised that the reason for the lack of content is because the translators are working on reconstructing our site, although using Export and Import probably is a much better solution.

"Foreign wikis can't possibly keep up with the pace at which English wikis create content" Maybe. Once all the existing content is transferred (hopefully including the overhaul), all the non-English wikias must do is the same thing we do: Add new content as the game developers release it. They may decide to do extra tweaking, but it probably won't be necessary at that point.

"On the other side, images would be very easy." Yes, and no. Yes, for reasons you already stated. No, because almost all of our images are of things or characters in the game, and we made things easy and intuitive by using  for the image parameters. On the non-EN wikias, they will translate all the page names, which means that none of the image calls will work because the names won't match.

Wait, hang on.

...............................................

Okay, I just spent three hours or more researching this. I found absolutely nothing on Community Central about shared image repositories. Then again, I didn't visit the forums, but I really expected to see something in their guides or Help pages.

I agree with you that Wikia placing all the interlanguage links at the bottom of the page makes no sense at all. The longer the page, the less sense it makes, and our wikia has a few REALLY long pages. Of course, we'll still want to have them, just for consistency and compatibility with Wikia's format. Your  looks like a great solution, though. In addition to the standard links at the bottom of the page, we can use your template or something similar to make it easier for users to find non-English content. And once they've found it, they've landed on an entire site in their language. We probably lose that user in the process, but the user is much happier, and that's what's most important.

Regarding portable infoboxes, I am aware of all the changes that are happening. I even mentioned them in my footnote #1 in my response above. ;-) Yes, I'm painfully aware that our complex templates are not mobile-friendly. On the positive side, we haven't yet done our major overhaul of the templates, so this allows us to accomplish two important projects at the same time.

Naturally, if we use your template, we will use Export and Import and give you proper credit. I may take you up on your offer of Brigadier assistance, as well.