OSDev.org

Hi,

I'm sure most of you now Wikipedia's interlanguage links, which are interwiki links to the same article in other languages and appear in the navigation bar at the left. Recently, at Lowlevel we've been discussing to use this mechanism to provide links between the German Lowevel and the English osdev.org articles and in the end we decided to give it a try. So for example in our USB article you'll find a link "English" in the navigation bar which refers to the USB article in the osdev.org wiki.

I think it would make a lot of sense to do the same in the other direction as well, i.e. having links in the osdev.org wiki which refer to the Lowlevel wiki as the German version of the article (and possibly extend it to other languages, though I'm not sure how many active communities there are for other languages).

What do you think?

I believe the technical articles on the Wiki should be in English, it would be difficult to verify if the translations are legitimate.. or of suitable quality.

Nothing is stopping enthusiastic non-English speaking users from registering osdev.ccTLD.

That's just my opinion anyway, it's entirely possible that others do want to i18n OSDev, they may even want to run around the streets naked covered in bacon grease.. perhaps while listening to deafeningly loud music.

I'm not sure if that's a really good idea though, but I'm a monolingual prude.

I'm not talking about creating articles in different languages in the osdev.org wiki. I agree that this wouldn't make much sense.

However, there are already OSDev communities in other languages (using a different domain, like your osdev.ccTLD), and at least Lowlevel does have a wiki with German articles. All I suggest is creating links between these existing articles. In most cases it won't be 1:1 translation but rather an article on the same topic (just as it is in Wikipedia). The link would only serve as a hint that says "by the way, if you happen to speak German, Lowlevel has an article for the same thing" (and vice versa).

Not being able to understand English means not being able to read official documentation, like the almighty intel manuals. Translating makes people dependent on people other than themselves to solve their problems, and in the case of new information prevents its use. I don't think advertising localisation will improve things in the long run, but only fracture communities and make the people without the needed qualities fail harder.

I personally look up almost everything on the English wiki. The only things I look up in the Dutch wiki are the things that are specific to my country, and I use interwiki links mainly when I do not know a translation for a certain term. For almost everything else, the English wiki provides more details and is almost always more helpful.

And unlike Brynet-Inc, I do speak German, and it's obvious the scene is quite large. But English happens to be the language of the trade and I doubt we can change that. Whatever you do there does not help most of us here.

I think that adds a less prejudiced -1 for links to lesser-used languages.

In my opinion, those links won't be used by people who don't understand English. If they don't, why should they read this wiki? It will however be used by people who understand both languages and just want to have different articles about one topic.
Everytime I read an article on Wikipedia, I read it both in English and in German (sometimes even in French). That way, I receive more information than by just looking at one article (even if the German ones are smaller).

If the article only existed in English, I wouldn't be creating any articles in other languages, for the reasons combuster has outlined already.

However, given the fact that these articles exist in both languages already, and people are reading and writing and otherwise using them anyway, then I think it would be a good idea to link the two together. It's in the innate nature of the web that these things should be linked together. I think it can only strengthen communities, and the community knowledge, by bringing them together.

Vive la link-love!

Any opinion of an admin?

Setting up interlanguage links is something that you can't do as a normal user, so we'd need at least one admin in favour of it.

AFAIK, there is only 1 admin (..chase).. not entirely sure if he's around, maybe one of the many moderators can help you out.

Hi,

From my perspective, Brynet-Inc is right (people who don't know English are doomed in the long run), and XanClic is right too (it'd be for people who are bilingual who may be more comfortable with a different language, not people who don't know English).

I can't see what harm it'd do (as people who don't know English will be doomed, regardless of whether there's inter-lingual links or not). Therefore, at least on the surface, I'm in favour of it.

However...

Why stop there? Why not have an "alternative sources" section that gives links to similar articles in other languages and similar articles in English (e.g. on Wikipedia, etc)? That way people could use the OSdev wiki as a way of finding sites they're most comfortable with, regardless of their preferred language.

However....

Why stop there? With lots of links, it'd become confusing for the reader, who won't know which links are "best" for them. To fix this, you could have some type of rating system that gives the readers a list of links that are sorted in order of "likely preference". This could maybe use information like the country the reader is in (based on their IP address), their browsing history, etc.

However...

While this sounds great, it'd be a major challenge to maintain, especially as the web is fairly dynamic. To avoid major hassles, we'd need to find some way of automatically finding web pages with similar content, removing dead links, collecting user information, etc. It'd work out to a lot of complex code and significant changes to the wiki software, but it'd be easier in the long run.

However, we could just have one link to Google's web site on each page instead. That way people would get all of these features and we wouldn't need to do any extra work.


Cheers,

Brendan

I think the maintenance issue Brendan has brought up is a problem here. Interlanguage links work on Wikipedia, because there are infinite hands to constantly check and update them. We're nowhere near infinite monkeys here, so I fear the information would get stale.

But that's just a tentative opinion of "how will this work out?", and should not be understood as a vote "against".

I don't actually think that's a huge problem. Wikipedia has a lot more hands to keep the links maintained, but on the other hand they have way more articles as well. I just looked at the statistics of both wikis, and osdev.org has 404 articles, Lowlevel has 294. That's a number that one person alone could handle on a weekend. In practice, I'm not sure if we would do it at once (though some Lowlevel people might volunteer for doing some of it) or if we would rather add a link whenever someone looks up an article in both wikis (as people already do often) and notices that they're not linked yet.

Brendan, what you want to tell us with your posting isn't completely clear to me. Was this a subtle way of announcing your disagreement without doing so explicitly? Surely a Google link doesn't provide the same as an interwiki link, so at some step you must have lost something...

Hi,



The German OS development scene might be strong enough to justify adding inter-language links to a German site. It'd be safe to assume (based on population alone) that the Japanese OS development scene is stronger, so if German is strong enough to justify inter-language links then surely so too would a Japanese site.

Let's take a quick look at a list of languages by number of native speakers. German is 10th. Surely it'd be fair to assume that there's 8 other languages (excluding English) that are likely to be better candidates for inter-language links than German. So, links to a German site, plus links to 8 more sites for other languages?

But where does it stop? Do we keep going down the list to Italian (and upset Turkish speakers when we tell them "Sorry...")? Do we allow links for any language at all, and have up to 300 links on each wiki page (including Elvish and Romulan)?

Now, let's say Fred runs a large Hindi OS development wiki, and Dave also runs an equally large Hindi OS development wiki. They both want the inter-language links on our wiki to point to their site. Do we link to both Hindi sites? If not, how do we decide fairly?

What I'm saying is screw all of that. If someone is too stupid to use Google, then...


Cheers,

Brendan

If somebody is too stupid to use Google, find tutorials and read datasheets, then having a wiki at all isn't going to be helpful to them. In practise, the wiki is very useful for those exact same people. I think we have, yet again, a problem where we're not quite sure what we want the wiki to do, and thus can't decide on anything else. Or at least, that's how it seems to me.

Brendan, again you're taking a reasonable and practical proposal and extend and exaggerate it until it becomes ridiculous. You can do that with almost any suggestion, but it's a way to shoot proposals down, not to have an objective discussion. If you don't like it, say just that.

So once again, let's get realistic: This is the list that we're talking about. Rather short, no? I think most of them don't even have a wiki (and the Korean and Polish one don't even seem to exist any more, btw). Now, for comparison look at Wikipedia. Much more languages on the left. Have you ever been annoyed by this list? It includes even languages like Basque.

If there are two communities for one language that both have a large wiki and both want interwiki links, either take the bigger one, or first come, first served. Practially speaking, I think this won't happen anyway.

How does having inter-language links limit you from googling things? It's just another option in the toolbox, not an entirely new toolbox.