Thread:Mhommer/@comment-15636815-20150309192405/@comment-15636815-20150311113002

As I begin to write this, the time posted tag on your latest response reads, "10 hours ago". During some of that time, I took a nap for a much-needed brain break. I spent most of the remainder educating myself on this issue as much as possible. Here are the highlights of what I've learned.

 We can write our version, and upload flags, for Slovak, Slovenian, Japanese, or seven declensions of Latin, for all I care. As long as people are happy. The template will display multiple flags next to each other, so I'm cool with people creating versions for everyone in Europe, if that's what they wanna do.
 * MediaWiki <> Wikia
 * One of these is a non-profit organization that built an engine that many websites now use, and is the almost exclusive source I use to gain technical knowledge that I use on TSWiki. It created Extension:Translate for its own family of sites and for the other sites that use their engine. The other is a for-profit company that hosts, free of financial charge, fan-based websites about anything that has fans.
 * MediaWiki <> Wikia
 * One of these encourages the use of all types of extensions to its engine, including Extension:Translate, which it documented heavily and which it promotes heavily. The other integrated into its engine all extensions that its users commonly need. While it allows some users access to less commonly used extensions that comprise a very short list, it strongly discourages the use of any extensions not supplied or listed.
 * MediaWiki <> Wikia
 * One of these supplies a technology that could benefit us here. The other prohibits us from doing so.
 * I found a solution that gives us a solution to our monolingual problem. It's quick. It's simple. It's actually somewhat elegant. Best of all, it comes in a package we're already using with great success--a template. Check it out! See if you're not just as impressed as I was.
 * I'm not too keen on the name, but we don't have to call ours what they call theirs. The point is that it works, and it can be applied on a page-by-page basis. Here's a page, from the same site, that uses the template. The tiny Russian flag icon is difficult to see, especially since the top third of the flag and the site's background are the same colour. Anyway, click the flag, and suddenly you're looking at a mirror image of the page: The text is in Cyrillic, and the flag is that of an English-speaking country. All we have to do is add the template to a page to be translated, and create a carbon copy of the page. Then we can let PeterHarb (or whoever) translate his ass off, to his heart's content.
 * Just in case you're curious, here's the working code of the template:

I created Category:Contracts:sk and tossed some Slovak on it. As it turns out, that's a bad name for the page. A much better name would be Category:Pogodbe. Or, since now it occurs to me that duplicate categories in multiple languages would be confusing--not to mention messy as hell--perhaps the best name is simply Pogodbe. And so, there it is. For category pages, translators can add links to the actual category pages along with appropriate explanations.

I'm sure we want to limit translation to informative pages only, though. I don't want to imagine the nightmare of attempting to maintain a site with multiple copies of every infobox for every item in the Shop and every offer. Even thinking about thinking about it makes me shudder.

We could create alternate versions of a few templates, though. I could make a Template:Date:sk to produce dates with Slovak abbreviations, for example, complete with a Slovak documentation page. I'd even be willing to duplicate several templates so we could put European-formatted numbers on European language pages. We'd need to establish some rules for people to follow, but I think we can create a place for those who would like to see non-English pages here.

By the way, did you know that MediaWiki and Wikia are not the same people? Apparently, that means that MediaWiki extensions are third-party extensions for our Wiki. Who knew? It must be a recent change....