The Wikipedia project is multilingual, with wikis in about a dozen languages being actively worked on and plenty more ready to go.
This Wikipedia Embassy is being set up as a central place for resources to help with cross-language issues -- site-wide policy and software decisions that affect all of us, the ongoing conversion of wikis to the new software, and interlanguage linking.
If you'd like to help, please set up an equivalent page on your own language's wiki and link them together, and list yourself as a Wikipedia Ambassador below.
see also Wikipedia:Create a new language in Wikipedia for how to start a wikipedia in your language.
The
Intlwiki-L Wikipedia mailing list is open to Wikipedians of all languages and nationalities. The primary language is English, but all languages are welcome -- someone else can translate if necessary. (Bilingual messages are
very welcome!)
A Wikipedia Ambassador should keep an eye on the Embassy and on the project's multilingual mailing list (Intlwiki-L) and English mailing lists (
Wikipedia-L and
Wikitech-L) for issues of interest to the community they represent. You should also bring attention to the overall multilingual community locally brought-up issues and ideas that may affect or benefit everyone.
- With the Esperanto wiki - Vikipedia Ambasadorejo (http://eo.wikipedia.com/wiki/Vikipedia_Ambasadorejo)
- With the French wiki - Ambassade francophone (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia-Diplomatie_Internationale)
- Consulaat van de Friese Wikipedia (http://fy.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Consulaat)
- Giskart (http://fy.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Giskart)
- With the Danish wiki - Wikipedia ambassaden (http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassaden)
- With the Polish Wikipedia (http://pl.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Przedstawicielstwo_dyplomatyczne_Wikipedii)
- With the German wiki - Deutsche Botschaft (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Botschaft)
- With the Enciclopedia Libre wiki (http://enciclopedia.us.es/wiki.phtml?title=enciclopedia:Embajada+de+Wikipedia)
- With the spanish wiki
- Youssefsan (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Youssefsan)
- With the Swedish wiki - Wikipedia ambassaden (http://sv.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_Ambassaden)
- With the Estonian wiki
- Kalev (http://et.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Kalev)
- With the Dutch (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassade) wiki
- Giskart (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebruiker:Giskart)
- With the ia.wiki • Ambassada (http://ia.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Ambassada_pro_Wikipedia) de Interlingua pro Wikipedia
- Ensjo (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ensjo) & Jay Bowks (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ILVI)
- With the it.wiki (http://it.wikipedia.com/) - Ambasciata d'Italia (http://it.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Ambasciata_Di_Wikipedia)
- Japanese Wikipedia
- Aoineko (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Utilisateur:Aoineko)
- Hungarian Wikipedia (to be installed as new; hu.wikipedia.com contains no significant information)
- With the eu.wiki (to be converted, too)
- With the ...? wiki
A Wikipedian from English Wikipedia, seav, created an excellent map of the Philippines and he agreed to adapt it so that other than English Wikipedias could benefit from his hard work.
The map for other Wikipedias is here (http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/a/af/Ph_general_map_blank.png)
and
the you can find the original map here (http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/8/86/Ph_general_map.png).
Ambassadors are asked to translate and forward this information on suitable pages within International Wikipedias.
Thanks to hard work by Pit (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Pit) from the German Wikipedia it was
possible to adapt a map of the Baltic Sea for English, Polish as well as German
Wikipedias.
See: Baltic Sea, Ostsee (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsee), Morze Bałtyckie (http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morze_Ba%B3tyckie)
- Centeno, backed by AstroNomo and Youssefsan, has been made a sysop. He is currently the only Spanish speaker on es.wikipedia.org
- March 1 : three new regular contributors: Mac (also on en:), Centeno and Paco
- AstroNomo annouced that he will not participate again on Spanish wiki for several months, because as a wikipedalcoholic, he wants to dedicate more time to his family and job
- A new mailing list in Spanish 5I have still to make announcment)
- This Wikipedia has reawakened recently after months of inactivity, with increased traffic of contributions every day during the last few months.
- We're still running the original wiki software and need to migrate.
- We don't have a Embassy yet.
- Polish Wikipedia has a completly new main page that is heavily based on the French Wikipedias. There are three Wikipedias with a similar design - the French (http://fr.wikipedia.org/), Danish (http://da.wikipedia.org/) and Polish (http://pl.wikipedia.org/)
- We have just reached 3000 articles.
- Some new contributors arrived. I hope they will stay (some contributors left Spanish wikipedia for Enciclopedia Libre)
- About 15 articles in the computer field during the first week.
- More templates pages for dates (ex: February 5)
- Copyright violation of one article about the president of Colombia (cut and paste of the official site under copyright)
- March 1 : New contributors (since late February) keep arriving. Unfortunately, there are so many edits and new contributors that we do not have time to care for them: greeting on their talk pages, reply to newbies' question, give tips on how to use software features... For examples, 2 new contributors arrived last night. 2 new contributos is significant for a small wiki as us.
- March 1 : 6402 articles
- March 28 :
- 8538 articles and French Wikipedia is now the biggest Wikipedia after English and German Wikipedia
- Not much new participants
- Ryo and Didier made sysops some days ago. We have now 8 sysops.
- We now have more articles (4825) than the Swedish wikipedia and Esperento Wikipedia. I hope it will remain a game with fair-play. Youssefsan. It is unfortunately not a game any more when you come to create articles just to put commas in :-)
- There are discussion to change the layout of the French homepage. Several propositions have been made.
- 6 February : We have reached 5000 articles. It keeps growing: a lot of a articles about senators/deputees (basic information) and some articles about years (template)
- New home page with colours and columns
- There is a project (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%E9dia%3AObjectif_15_000_articles), started some weeks ago, to reach 15,000 articles. The project page list a number of sections where we can write a lot of articles.
- Tim has realized the statistics (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Statistiques_participants_du_02/02/2003_au_09/02/2003) for 02/02/2003 till 09/02/2003. 2249 edits in one week and 46 wikipedians have been active that week.
- February 18: We have more than 6000 articles. Currently, 6130.
- February 23 : copyright violation on at least 2 articles by a new particpant. The author has promised not to do it again.
- See also: Wikipedia:French Wikipedia for archive
- Subpages are progressively eliminated for countries. See for example Argentina
- I have discovered something that I didn't knew :
EL enables in some way links to other wikis. For example
- [[es:México]]
you will see
México in the text (nothing in the menu bar) and it will link to es.wikipedia.com/cgi?México.
- Juanan announced that he was installing the new server with phase3. Announcements on EL (http://enciclopedia.us.es/wiki.phtml?title=Enciclopedia:Noticias_mensuales)
On december 3, the danish wiki (and several others), were hit by a malicious vandal with some kind of bot, erasing more than 100 pages before someone noticed and blocked it.
From this experience we have learned that it is important to have enough administrators so you can quickly block such a vandal.
It only took about 30 minuttes before we stopped it, but it managed to erase over 100 pages anyway. Christian
This site has gone into a newly developed activity thanks to members in protest leaving from another "wiki"-type of community in Sweden, www.susning.nu, (privately owned-) which started with commercial ads on November 21) and we are trying to develop the Swedish wikipedia at sv.wikipedia.com. This site was (due to the high activity at susning) a boring and lonesome place, now suddenly because of the anger arising at susning, we are exploding with activity. Thanks to the accumulated material the members wrote at susning (we are only "allowed" to bring with us what each member wrote there, nothing else, but this might be over 1000 articles) we expect to develop the numbers of articles very fast in the beginning. We are also presently translating the danish version of the software in order to upgrade - altough we are also afraid of that since we noticed some servers are slow? - within some days.
Anyhow, we will be grateful for any type of advices and support, we already had some from Denmark, and we established an informal nordic joint venture within the nordic Wikipedias (named The WIKIngs (http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIKIng) of course) and hope to be able to support each other within the scandinavian language tree. 8 glasses- All is well// Dan Koehl
- About the sv wikipedia, I wonder, why are you only "allowed" to take your stuff while moving away ? the susning was not a "free" wiki ??? user:anthere
- Dan gave an answer to this question here (I've got a new user page !)
One question, it seems that the sv wikipedia is running an old version of the software (perl based, UseMode?). I wonder what is required to upgrade it to the new php based software? Is anyone working on this? //user:Johan Dahlin[?]
- I pointed the Swedes in the right direction (mainly towards this page and how to translate Language.php), and they have now completed the translation and upgrade to the phase III software. -- Christian
New web site address www.wikipedia.nl (http://www.wikipedia.nl).
This address opens on a Welkom_Wolkom message and propose direct access to nl (Nederlands) and fy (Frysk) wikipedia (default nl). It was designed, in particular, for promotion in the Netherlands (where the official language is Dutch., and Frisian in the province Friesland). For the Dutch people the address www.wikipedia.nl is more likely to be remembered and it gives the very small Friesian Wikipedia a better chance to attract visitors.
New web site address www.wikipedia.be (http://www.wikipedia.be).
This address opens on a Welkom_Bienvenue_Willkommen message and propose direct access to fr, de and nl wikipedia (defaut nl). It was designed, in particular, for promotion in Belgium (where these three langages are spoken). For belgium people, the address www.wikipedia.be is more likely to be remembered.
- The Malay language Wiki has not yet been started. But, strangely, the 2 letter code is MS. Malaysia uses the 2 letter code '.my' on the internet, and also this is now prevalent in popular culture, with many companies putting a My- prefix. If the Malay language Wiki can be moved to MY, there's a greater chance it could succeed. WillSmith (Malaysia)
- Hmm, that conflicts with Burmese, whose 2-letter language code is MY. --Brion 08:06 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)
- Well, Burmese would be MY because the country is known as Myanmar now. And Myanmar gets the .mm TLD. Nobody is using MM in wikipedia yet. So, why not move Burmese (Myanmar) to MM and Malay (Malaysia) to MY? Where do these 2 letter codes come from anyway? WillSmith (Malaysia)
- We use the web-standard ISO 639 2-letter language codes (http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langcodes.html) for all languages (with the present embarrassing exception of English, which will be fixed one of these days. In any case, en.wikipedia.org does get you here, too). These aren't national or geographical indicators like TLDs. It's not even decided for sure that we want to keep the language marker at the beginning of the hostname; see m:Thoughts on language integration. --Brion 09:43 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)
- How to start a wikipedia page if the language is NOT in the ISO 639 ?--pektiong
- Pratically every language is in the standard. Only fantasy languages are excluded - Sindarin, Klingon, Pig Latin, etc. A leetspeak \/\/!K!|*3D!@ would have nowhere near as many contributors as the standard English. --Geoffrey
- How about wikipedia follow RFC 1766, by using ISO 639 language code + ISO 3166 country code combination, instead of only by ISO 639??--BoogieMan
- Then we'd lose so many pages to en-us.wikipedia.org, en-uk.wikipedia.org, etc. There'd be a yellow-colored English Wikipedia namespace and a yellow-coloured English Wikipedia namespace with redundant articles, and we might even end up with two Meta-Wikipedias, one grey and the other gray. --Geoffrey
- Wikipedia will be following RFC 3066 (ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3066.txt) for language tagging (see some discussion at m:ISO 639-1 vs. ISO 639-2). Where a 2- or 3-letter ISO 639 code by itself is insufficient to identify a language that's actually being used, regional variants or other codes registered with IANA (http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso639/iana-lang-assignments.html) may be used. --Brion 04:50 17 May 2003 (UTC)
