Thread:Yatalu/@comment-15636815-20151012194734/@comment-4142476-20151013134709

Let me first elaborate on the "language barrier" -

When you are hosting content in another language on your wiki, there will always be an abyss named "language barrier" between yourself and your admin team, and the users who are translating and editing the content in this other language. You don't always know what is spam, you can't tell apart which users are editing in good or bad faith, etc. Most you can do is rely on what other editors say it means.

Additionally, you might start selecting fellow admins more on their language abilities and less on their skills as an admin. A monolingual Spanish user might be ten times a better admin than a bilingual Spanish-English speaker, but you can't choose them because your Spanish is limited to "hola" and words I won't post here.

Not only that, but having your wiki in multiple languages will be confusing. Both users and viewers will accidentally end up on pages of languages they don't understand by merely browsing. Something that would easily be avoided by interlanguage links saying "In other languages: " where it's clear that they'd get non-English content.

Furthermore, having the majority of your content still in English could easily scare new editors away. They might think your wiki is English or that they need to be bilingual in order to contribute.

At last, if you're not planning on translating the article names as well ("every single one, one at a time"), even on your own wiki to redirect them, do you think your non-English users will find them easily? I think it might prove difficult.

You would be excluding independently created non-English wikis -

As many languages as you may have on your main wiki, you cannot avoid that users will not create non-English versions of your wiki regardless, because 1) that's what happens on all other wikis, 2) they might disagree with (some of) your wiki's policies or 3) they might just not speak English. What will you do?

If you say "no", say you guys only want non-English pages that are on your own wikis and won't allow interlanguage links with them, there'll probably be friction. These users will be misunderstood and you'll eventually end up with two islands: one island that is your wiki with several languages, and one island that is all the other wikis with their languages.

If you say "okay", allow them their own wikis and let them connect to your articles with interlanguage links... then you might end up having disputes with the small language communities on your own wiki, some of who might want to fork from your wiki and start their own wiki anyway. And you'll get a confusing system with some languages on and some languages off your wiki.

Being admin instantly might be overwhelming -

Yes, while that is certainly true, it also allows the user(s) in question you are working with to deviate from your English wiki's policies and layout and gives them more freedom. Turning it around, it might also be overwhelming for new foreign users to come to a wiki with a mountain of policies written mostly in English. Even on our wiki, with many active translators, policies sometimes remain untranslated or outdated and we have to ask people to check out the English versions instead.

Additionally, you can still suggest one or two of your wiki's admins to join the user in becoming admin: they can do the coding and the layout, they can import templates and help with maintenance and to deal with certain conflicts and issues that don't require knowledge of the local language. It'd give the new admin a feedback voice for how they're doing as an admin which in itself is already a helpful new experience for them.

Having to duplicate all content and complex templates -

As I mentioned shortly in the item above, one of the points that plays for putting them in separate wikis, is that they're allowed to keep things simple. Foreign wikis can't possibly keep up with the pace at which English wikis create content. Nor will they benefit from having the same complex policies and templates. That won't change whether they're on your wiki or on a separate wiki.

Other-language wikis also are unique projects, not duplicates of their English version with language as the only difference. Making them this might ease it for the editors in the sense that they don't have to do their own research or coding, but is at the same time very restrictive.

If you want to use certain templates and translate all the parameters (otherwise your foreign users would still be using English parameters anyway??) and displayed texts, your template would get super complicated with a billion cases of langSwitch. Not to mention that the values inserted would also have to be langSwitched? 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.

On the other side, images would be very easy. Staff can enable a Shared Image Repository (SIR) on request. This allows the wiki where it's enabled to use any images uploaded on the host wiki (usually the English wiki) directly without requiring an extra upload. Besides writing a request for the SIR to be enabled, it takes no extra effort once it's in place.

On visibility of the other wikis -

I think it's also logical to think the other wikis get more visibility when they're on your wiki together, but with more thought this might actually not be true. English users might end up on non-English pages too often and vice versa. Languages with only a dozen pages might drown between pages of English or bigger languages, and the speakers of those languages might not even think it's worth it.

On the other hand, interlanguage links are also at the entire bottom of the page and might barely be noticed by any visitor. To promote interlanguage links, you could do something similar to what I did at w:c:hvetshran:Hvetshran (with Template:Languages). There's also a script that adds a dropdown with flag icons next to the edit button that adds similar functionality, you might've come across it somewhere.

I also believe that having other wikis (=your other language versions) link to your wiki and your wiki link to them, would help with SEO and increase the Google ranking of both(/all) wikis involved.

Editing would no longer be as easy -

One big issue with the system that we're using at the WLB is that it's less easy to edit and inexperienced editors will not know how to find the page they need to be at even if it's just to correct a typo. This is because all the actual articles will be located at subpages /en, /es, /de, etc.

If you plan on using the langSwitch for the full article content and not use subpages, this has another problem: it will make pages huge to load in editor. A lot of text in the edit mode will also be very confusing and it might be accidentally erased by someone who thinks it doesn't belong.

If you want to keep an influx of new editors, putting this extra barrier on your wiki is not what you want.

Using flagnav and LangSwitch -

Yes, I'm okay with you borrowing these templates, if you do so according to Wikia's licensing. I'd prefer that you use Special:Export and indicate to export with full page history so all previous revisions can be viewed on your wiki. When using Special:Import on your wiki, please put in the summary that the templates come from wlb.wikia.

Also, with "flagnav", we have only added the languages that are needed on our wiki. You may want some different ones. You'd also have to upload the files used to display the flags with.