A wiki doesn’t have to be in one language. Wikigit can hold the same article in several, as separate pages that know about each other, so a reader lands on the version in their language and can switch with a click. This very page, for instance, has a French counterpart, and the language bar moves between them.
How the languages sit edit
One language is the wiki’s default, and its pages keep plain addresses — /coffee. Every other language is marked by a short prefix on the address, so the French version of that page lives at /fr/coffee and the German at /de/coffee. The arrangement reads naturally in a URL and makes a page’s language obvious at a glance.
The translations of one article are tied together by a shared translation group — a small label every version carries — so the wiki knows that /coffee and /fr/coffee are the same subject in two languages, and can offer the reader the switch.
For readers and writers edit
A reader gets a language bar on any page that has translations, listing the languages it’s available in. Where a language is missing, the bar doesn’t go dead — it offers to start that translation, opening a new page in the right place, ready to write. A wiki fills out its languages the same organic way it fills out everything else: one page at a time, by whoever shows up able to write it.
Turning languages on for a wiki, and choosing which ones, is a site setting covered in Customize.
See also edit
- Customize — enabling languages for your wiki.
- Organizing — page names and addresses, including prefixes.
- Links and references — how links resolve to the reader’s language.