Thread:Yatalu/@comment-15636815-20151012194734/@comment-15636815-20151013115424

I was up all night working on this. Posting on your wall was the last thing I did before I went to bed. Apologies. :-)

I understand what you're saying about the difficulty of managing users whose first language is not a language any of the admins know, and who may not have any language in common with any of the admins. On the other hand, while several of our users are willing to help with translation, I'm not confident they're willing to administrate an entire wiki, especially since that means duplicating all of our content and our numerous, complex templates.

On top of that, we're working on a major overhaul of the entire site. We're updating and simplifying almost all of our templates. We're working to create consistent formatting for various pages and various types of pages. All of this hinges on completing a new Style Guide, on which I've been working for more than a year. If someone creates a new Wikia and works long and hard to duplicate, then translate, our structure and content, they will not like the idea of redoing large portions of their work just a few months from now--all while learning how to administrate a wiki via on-the-job training. It likely would be so overwhelming that the admin of the new site would just quit, effectively killing the project. At that point, all our efforts to support the new site would be wasted.

The other admins and I previously have discussed the idea of supporting multiple languages on one site. We're willing to allow pages in other languages if it helps bring more contributors. The game we play introduces new content three days per week. We need all the help we can get, just to keep up with adding new content. That's the primary reason that our overhaul is taking so long, to be honest. Although setting up multilingual support will take time and effort, I believe the long-term benefits will outweigh the costs.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that a user did agree to become the admin for another language's version of our site, there are some things that will make the task of duplicating our wiki easier. While our wiki now has over 7,500 pages, the vast majority of the pages display only one infobox about one item in the game, such as a locomotive, a wagon, or a building or decoration that players may build on their stations. Since all of these pages are driven by templates, converting these pages requires the following: Of course, we also have many pages that will need translation of article content, so the heavy work for the guy-who-never-wanted-to-be-an-admin-in-the-first-place is only beginning.
 * 1) Duplicate the templates that produce the output.
 * 2) Translate the names of the input parameters.
 * 3) Translate the text that the templates display on the screen.
 * 4) No other parts of the templates need to be translated.
 * 5) Duplicate the article pages.
 * 6) Use some type of mass substitution software to find and replace the EN parameter names with the XX parameter names.
 * 7) Translate the page names.
 * 8) Every. Single. One.
 * 9) One.
 * 10) at.
 * 11) a.
 * 12) time.
 * 13) Profit!

Finally, I will answer the question with which you started. ;-) The templates we would want to use would be the backbone of the multilingual display system: flagnav and LangSwitch, along with any other templates on which these two depend.