One Wiki

As I did when I moved from wikitext 2.0 to markdown and then jumped to the extreme, no wikitext at all, I’m going to take the previous discussion of native script editing and take it much further: Transliteration is just Translation between languages that are really really similar.

If we can write in British English and read in American English, or write in Cyrillic and read in Latin script, or write in Arabic-script Urdu and read in Devanagari-script Hindi, why isn’t the Content Translation Tool and LanguageConverter different aspects of the same thing?

We have completely separate technical stacks for translation and transliteration, and we probably don’t need them.  In fact, everything I showed about native script editing could be generalized to native language editing, to allow you to edit in your native language and have that transparently translated.  And in fact, why don’t we allow editors and readers to work in multiple languages more generally?

For bilingual readers, or language learners, why not show parallel texts for bilingual readers?  This is a really crappy mockup, but it gets the point across:

Why can’t we track parallel texts between (say) Swahili and English, and prompt an editor to apply a parallel change to English Wikipedia when an article about Africa is changed in Swahili Wikipedia?

And why not facilitate multilingual discussions among our community, breaking down silos? We have really good translation technology now. There’s no reason why English editors operate in almost complete ignorance of edits and content on (say) Swahili projects.  Why can’t this article on Nairobi be maintained cooperatively between all the folks who speak the languages spoken in Nairobi and know this subject well? Why not facilitate cooperation between the editors of the English and Swahili articles?

In countries with minority languages and an "official government language", editors on minority language wikis often tell me they have trouble building their community because users keep finding content missing from their local wiki. They get in the habit of checking the "official language" wiki instead to find the missing articles, and then eventually just start going first to the official language wiki and are lost from the community of the local wiki. We can do a better job keeping readers on their local wikis. We could transclude content from the "official" language, but there's no reason to show folks content they don't understand. Why not automatically translate it, with an easy on-ramp to use Content Translation to start a local article?

I had a poster on this topic at Wikimania 2018 and it was part of my position statement for the 2018 Wikimedia Developer Summit. It builds on other topics presented in the Dozen Visions for Wikitext and Plan for Scribunto:

• Annotations to track correspondences and maintain parallel texts (allowing helpful cross-language editor nudges) without cluttering the wikitext for the monolingual reader/editor,
• Multilingual templates (related to Visual Templates), so that collaboration on technical content can also occur across language barriers, and
• even esoteric syntax bits like {{#lang}} to better support multilingual content on the same page, so we can render everyone's scripts properly when we're talking together.

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