Interlingual coordination

In other languages: cs - Deutsch - English - Esperanto - Français - hi - 日本語 (ja) - 한국어(ko) - Nederlands - Polski - ro - Svenska - Tiếng Việt (vi) - 中文(zh) edit

Note: Charles McRobert should be consulted for translations into the Czech and Slovak languages. Matters of word choice may be ambiguous. For the sake of clarity, contact g3w3@w3terra.net, with a link to the article in question. If the editor has a native language of Czech or Slovak, it may remain useful to allow me to have an oversight. Please restrict the matters to those where the outcome is unclear. This offer is ongoing. Although I am able to translate in seven languages, this offer extends only to Czech and Slovak. In case of dire problems with the Hungarian language, I am also available. However, I may elect to not do so, due to the complexities of this language.

We use Wikipedia-L the to coordinate Wikipedia across different languages. Please take a look at the Wikipedia Embassy and join if you're interested in the coordination project.

The Wikiipedia community is committed to including any and all languages for which there are Wikipedians willing to do the work. We are aware that many of the world's 6,500 languages are not well-represented on computers or the web, and we are committed to working with language speakers and computing organizations to support as many languages as possible (en:right to fork).

Each language Wikipedia currently has a separate set of user accounts. Links between articles in different languages are called interlanguage links.

The URL of the wikipedia for a given language is xx.wikipedia.org, where xx is the 2-letter language code as per ISO 639. For languages without an ISO 639 2-letter language code, the 3-letter language code is used, or if that also does not exist, the hyphenated IETF code is used; or if that also does not exist, a custom ISO-based hyphenated language code is made. (On the mailing list and in discussion, people often write xx: to mean the xx-l anguage wikipedia, as in I'm a regular on fr:.)

Projects

Wiki encyclopedias that are at least somewhat active have been started in various languages: see Complete list of language Wikipedias available for a full list.

There are also other related projects: see also Complete list of Wikimedia projects.

There are other, non-Wikimedia, free Wiki-based encyclopedia projects independent of Wikipedia:

Enciclopedia Libre — Spanish (Castellano)
Викизнание — Russian (Русский)
~~Susning.nu — Swedish (Svenska)~~ - not active
~~Holopedia~~ - not active

What can I do to help?

Please consult Wikipedia Embassy and become an ambassador
Consider joining Wikipedia-L, the international mailing list to discuss various topics
Just jump through Interlanguage links, and actually create some.
Please, update Goings-on on meta (as a central point) and on your local wikipedia to keep people informed day to day
Read and participate to Wikimedia News
Give us a feedback on how your wikipedia is doing on Reports

Start a new language wikipedia. See the Language proposal policy for information on how to start a project in your language.

A certain amount of "critical mass" is necessary in order for a wiki to "take off". Without 5-10 p eople 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. :-)

Statistics

See List of Wikipedias for a more complete overview.

As of November 1, 2003, the number of non-English language articles increased to over 50% of the total number, probably for the first time. This is an encouraging sign in favour of linguistic diversity.

As of February 18, 2004, the English language wikipedia had 209,637 articles, while the next 19 had 261,352 on this date, i.e. the number of non-English language articles was more than 55% of the total. The 2nd to 9th languages (de, ja, fr, pl, sv, nl, es, da) together had 210,448 articles, together matching the number of articles in the English language version.

The 20 largest Wikipedias (February 7, 2010):

English ( 3,185,803 )
German (Deutsch) ( 1,021,695 )
French (Français) ( 909,983 )
Polish (Polski) ( 673,359 )
Italian (Italiano) ( 655,663 )
Japanese (日本語) ( 651,523 )
Dutch (Nederlands) ( 586,064 )
Spanish (Español) ( 560,142 )
Portuguese (Português) ( 542,406 )
Russian (Русский) ( 491,274 )
Swedish (Svenska) ( 345,662 )
Chinese (中文) ( 293,663 ) - uses both traditional and simplified characters
Norwegian (Norsk), bokmål and riksmål edition ( 246,829 )
Finnish (Suomi) ( 229,481 )
Catalan (Català) ( 224,873 )
Ukrainian (Українська) ( 187,888 )
Hungarian (Magyar) ( 154,421 )
Czech (Čeština) ( 148,176 )
Turkish (Türkçe) ( 140,857 )
Romanian (Română) ( 138,506 )

Links relevant to coordination

Multilingualism (new as of 5/2004; merge with this page?)

There is also an English Wikipedia available -- International help necessary

Help us find a Wikipedia mascot!

Translation and cross-fertilization

Wikipedia Machine Translation Project

Transwiki - for moving articles between different languages

Wikipedias and cross-fertilisation

Standards, formats, character sets

Date formats for language linking

Caractères spéciaux - special characters to copy & paste on each page?

International community and forks

Future of international Wikipedias as part of the main community

Thoughts on Wikipedia interlanguage priorities

Two Russian WPs

South Slavic NPOV page

Open letter to the Enciclopedia Libre group (Historical; from the fork of the spanish wikipedia in spring 2002)

Language integration ideas

Thoughts on language integration - Proposal on language integration: merge of database

Multilingual communication - It is not neccessary to have wikipedias in different languages. There could be one multilingual wikipedia. People will do the coordination what to translate themselves. -- MattisManzel

Historical pages

Wikipedia software upgrade status - perhaps outdated

Mailing list-s cleaner topic segregation of the mailing lists

Untranslated messages - this one may be outdated

International wikipedia question

Final international solution