Non-English Wikipedias

We have just created Intlwiki-L, which we'll use to coordinate and improve the various non-English Wikipedias. Please join if you're interested in the future of these projects.

Wiki encyclopedias have been started in other languages:

• [Afrikaans]
• [Arabic (Araby)]
• [Catalan (Català)]
• [Chinese (Hanyu)]
• [Danish (Dansk)]
• [Dutch (Nederlands)]
• [German (Deutsch)]
• [Esperanto]
• [French (Français)]
• [Hebrew (Ivrit)]
• [Hungarian (Magyar)]
• [Italian (Italiano)]
• [Japanese (Nihongo)]
• [Norwegian (Norsk)]
• [Portuguese (Português)]
• [Russian (Russkiy)]
• [Spanish (Castellano)]
• [Swedish (Svensk)]
• [Polish (Polska)]
• [Basque (Euskara)]
• Complete list of non-English Wikipedias available

A certain amount of "critical mass" is necessary in order for a wiki to "take off". Without 5-10 people eagerly writing and arguing and playing with each other, it wouldn't be as much fun. So we encourage anyone who wants to build a wiki in their own language to also go out and announce/recruit for it. :-)

Here are some "international Wikipedia" policy questions. To a certain extent, these questions will resolve themselves, though.

• How are the various Wikipedias going to be coordinated, if at all? Will we have several quite different articles in different languages? Will English be a lingua franca? See /Coordination to discuss.
• What are some suggestions about what can be put on new language Wikipedia home pages? See /Homepages to discuss.
• What are some suggestions about how to use "international Wikipedias" for purposes of Nupedia article translation projects? See /Nupedia Translation to discuss.
• I have just noticed the fact that the top and bottom bars are in english. Can something be done about that?

Those lines come from a configuration file that the public can't access (I believe). Please see /TextToTranslate for how to submit translations.

• Is there going to be an easy way to link from one language to another?
• Anything else?

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We would like to solicit your help.

On some of our International Wikipedia wikis, we have not yet translated the copyright warning into the target languages.

Here is the text of the warning:

Please notice that all contributions to Wikipedia are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License. If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't hit submit. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain resource. DO NOT USE COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!

Here are the languages we need this in:

http://af.wikipedia.com/ Afrikaans

http://ar.wikipedia.com/ Arabic (Araby)

http://ca.wikipedia.com/ Catalan (Català)

http://zh.wikipedia.com/ Chinese (Hanyu)

http://de.wikipedia.com/ German (Deutsch)

http://fr.wikipedia.com/ French (Français)

http://he.wikipedia.com/ Hebrew (Ivrit)

http://hu.wikipedia.com/ Hungarian (Magyar)

http://it.wikipedia.com/ Italian (Italiano)

http://ja.wikipedia.com/ Japanese (Nihongo)

http://pt.wikipedia.com/ Portuguese (Português)

http://ru.wikipedia.com/ Russian (Russkiy)

http://es.wikipedia.com/ Spanish (Castellano)

http://sv.wikipedia.com/ Swedish (Svensk)

Please, send translations of this very important text by e-mail to jasonr at bomis.com. Thanks! --LMS

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Related projects

• [Wikipedia Machine Translation Project]

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/Talk