Anabaptistwiki:Language policy

From Anabaptistwiki

This page describes the current multi-lingual policy on the Global Anabaptist Wiki.

Pages in Multiple Languages

Within the Global Anabaptist Wiki we are building a set of encyclopedic pages about the global Anabaptist church in four languages (English, French, German, and Spanish). Articles in the Global Anabaptist Wiki should be translated into these four languages. The following are guidelines for writing articles in multiple languages.

  • English is the root language for pages in the Global Anabaptist Wiki. All root pages should be named and written in English.
  • Other languages should be placed in an appropriately named language page by adding the appropriate language code to the root page title. E.g. the Spanish version of Anabaptistwiki:About should be at Anabaptistwiki:About/es (not Anabaptistwiki:Sobre or Anabaptistwiki:Sobre/es). To see what language code to use, see the language code section below.
  • To ensure that language templates for the Global Anabaptist Wiki work correctly English should always be the language used for the root pate. In other words language codes should only be used for translations other than English. For example, the English Anabaptistwiki:About page has no language code while the Spanish version, Anabaptistwiki:About/es, has the Spanish language code (/es) added to the page name.
  • Please note - when translating pages you need to change any categories to include the appropriate language code. For example, if you translate a page from English to French (fr) and the page contains the tag [[Category:Policy|Language policy]], you need to replace it with [[Category:Policy/fr|Language policy]]. This way category pages will be separated by language. For example, the "Paraguay" category will contain all the English articles that fall under the "Paraguay" category, while the "Paraguay/es" category will contain the the Spanish translations of those same articles.

Creating and Naming Pages

The title for the root page will be in local church or congregation's native language, not English, (e.g. While the root page for the Guatemalan Evangelical Mennonite Church page will be written in English it will be titled Iglesia Evangélica Menonita de Guatemala, not Guatemalan Evangelical Mennonite Church).

To create a page in another language create a link using the page name and the appropriate language code follow that link to the new page to create a translated page. In other words, if an English article about the Jesus Village Chapel, South Korea exists and you would like to create a Spanish version, create a link to a new page using the following code [[Jesus Village Chapel, South Korea/es]] (To create links for the same article in other languages use the following format; French: [[Jesus Village Chapel, South Korea/fr]], German: [[Jesus Village Chapel, South Korea/de]]).

When starting new pages, create article stubs for the languages you are not using to make future editing easier. Be sure to use the stub template that correlates with the language you are using to write the article (e.g. A stub for a French translation should use the {{stub/fr}}, not the {{stub}}, template). To learn more about different stub templates read the stub article.


The main page

The English version of our front page is located at Global Anabaptist Wiki. Translated versions are located at Global Anabaptist Wiki/code, where code is the language code (e.g. Global Anabaptist Wiki/es).

Language Codes

Throughout the Global Anabaptist Wiki you should use the language codes specified by the MediaWiki software when creating language-specific content (see Names.php for the full and up-to-date list).

Following are the language codes French, German, and Spanish:

  • French: /fr
  • German: /de
  • Spanish: /es