Foswiki China Proposal

The Background

More and more chinese users are looking for help about foswiki use/install/plugins etc, and I got queries about it almost everyday. And after 2 years adoption of TWiki, my company(Infosys) is also planning to migrate to Foswiki.

Current status

• • Currently CoriaXu hold the domain foswiki.org.cn, and links it to a foswiki1-0-7 install on a shared host, however it is not performaing very well sometime... (see UseOfDomainsMotion for the proposal of this domain)
  • All the "entrance" pages like "Home", "About", "Documentation", etc have been translated into Chinese (foswiki.org.cn) so it is now a basic start for "Foswiki China" to boom.

Conclusions on 2009 Nov Hannover Summit

CrawfordCurrie - 24 Nov 2009: we will tackle it in three phases:

1. KoenMartens will lead a project to enable creation of a Chinese version of the System web (and possibly other webs) that can be selected seamlessly)
   • A completely seperate Foswiki instance can be set up to run for the chinese version.
   • cn.foswiki.org to be created
   • foswiki.org.cn to be redirected to cn.foswiki.org
   • Coria to send the translated skin to Koen
     • The updated template file FoswikiSiteSkinNavigationTemplate.txt.
2. We will use the learning from that to plan how we handle this sort of work for other languages
3. Parallel to this, and driven by requirements, we will move the core to unicode

see the notes at FoswikiSummit2009OpenSpace#Unicode_in_the_core_and_internat

Other discussions

• Questions of Koen
  • We can probably host this on the foswiki.org server, although i'm not sure how well the connectivity with china is. How are page loading times for foswiki.org at your end? - Coria: the connectivity is a little slow... (the page loading time is around 3~4 seconds), But I still prefer hosting this on foswiki.org server, stable is the most concern now.
  • I know the Germans have been brooding about a translation of the documentation, keeping things up-to-date is a huge commitment though. How do we make sure that useful content that is new on for example the Chinese part of the site is translated to the English, German, etc.. sites? - Coria: we havn't reach this stage yet. Currently we are in the stage of introducing foswiki to China users(mostly questions & answers), as more and more chinese users are invovled, we will have a need to guide skilled peple to contribute to the english repository only...
  • What is the scope of the translations? - Coria: currently let's only target the "entrance page", for skilled chinese users English is not a big problem, for new users we can set up a forum.
  • Will it be a totally independent part of the site, or really translations of existing English pages? - Coria: only an "Chinese Entrance" to foswiki.org core & community, cn.wordpress.org is an example.

• Crawford's questions
  • What should the community strategy be regarding such international sites? -
    • Coria: i think we need to at least come up a draft on this weeked, any idea?
  • Is China special in this respect?
    • Coria: no... may be a pilot, just like I introduced wiki in my project 2 years ago
  • What are the pros and cons?
    • Coria: one obvious pros is to make foswiki be more intimate to non-english users, to pull in more users & contributors; cons is additional effort, in-consistency, etc.

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