User talk:Walter

First to type on your user:talk page, what an honor. When it all seems like too much, as I'm sure it must, I've left something here that I hope you might find amusing. Cjl 20:56, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Templates / Barnraising

Do you know any way to bulk transfer templates from wiki to wiki? If no faster method is known, I've parsed a list of OLPC wiki templates (many will be applicable with minimal modifications) and placed it in User:Cjl/Sandbox. This page can facilite multi-window copy/paste review and transfer of templates. Cjl 01:50, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

That'd probably be worthwhile. I've been cleaning things up as I go, but it would be faster to just copy... --Walter 01:54, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I transferred some heavily-used ones manually using multi-window copy/paste. We need to recruit some more sophisticated wiki-help to get things like plug-ins and extensions synched up so that (for instance, "templates with parser function", e.g. Template:GoogleTrans-en) transfer over smoothly. I pinged SJ about it, but he's busy. Maybe one of the wiki-admins are savvy enough, it's a bit over my head. I'm going quiet for a while, on the road, back in a week or two. Cjl 17:04, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll try recruit a wiki admin!! Safe travels. --Walter 17:48, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Thought on translations

Before you spend a lot of time on translations via the translations template, consider the potential of the GoogleTrans-xx templates I'm starting to develop/deploy on OLPC wiki. Note, it will require the same plugin/extension magic-dust currently installed on the OLPC wiki to be sprinkled here before they will work.

• GoogleTrans-en for starting from English page (example). Click on Spanish and continue browsing rest of wiki in espanol inside Google frame.

• GoogleTrans-es for starting from Spanish page (example). Click English and see that page and any linked lang-es page in English.

• 20-odd other variations possible

The idea is that you want to lower language barrier, but you don't want your most valuable trilingual (1 lang-en, 2 lang-xx, 3 wiki/Python/C/Linux/Sugar/etc.) assets spending a lot of time on keeping up with rapidly evolving edits. By the time a page becomes stable, it's probably too late to get meaningful input from a mono or bi-lingual non-lang-en audience (like teachers, local coders, etc.).

For wiki pages, I think that any translation now is better than a great translation later. Allows you to lower language barrier immediately (in a usually good enough manner) and reserve human translation effort for Pootle and tech-phrasing sensitive pages. Try the provided links to OLPC wiki and let me know what you think. Cjl 19:39, 20 May 2008 (UTC)