[OSM-dev] Translation of the Main Page?

[Lars Aronsson]

Jochen Topf wrote:

> I am a bit confused by MediaWiki here. There are already pages 
> starting with "De:" in German. But those seem to be normal 
> pages, they are not in a special namespace, they just happen to 
> begin with "De:".

This design is not one of OSM's proudest moments.  I guess it was 
an easy way to organize links between translated pages, but the 
resulting URLs are not pretty.  (According to my 1993 esthetics, 
URLs should be pretty.)

For Swedish, I wrote an [[Introduktion på svenska]] and 
[[sv:About]] is just a redirect to that page.  Since different 
languages in most cases use entirely different words, it is very 
easy to combine [[introduction]] and [[Einführung]] in the same 
wiki.  When the names do collide, you can make elegant maneuvers 
like [[introduction en français]].

An insecure/nervous/inexperienced programmer tends to define 
dozens of classes or functions, none of which does anything much, 
and most of which should benefit from being removed/merged in the 
next refactoring.  On the wiki we see a tendency to create many 
pages, each containing 2 or 3 sentences.  This makes it 
practically impossible to navigate or overview the whole, not to 
mention those who prefer to print a text to read it in bed. Before 
you decide to split a text into many wiki pages, do consider if 
anybody really needs to link to each individual part.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se