Hello folks,
Time for me to chip in ? Just some loose thoughts on the topic...
First, very nice to see people making a conscious effort to accommodate non-francophones - this mindset certainly helps expand the pool of users and improve the profile of SPIP generally. Thanks collectively.
Next, this subject opens a Pandora's box of problems relating to what should go into any new "official" SPIP website: does it become simply a catch-all for EVERYTHING spipish, regardless of language ? Does it contain ONLY material in English, without any reference to French original material ? This is probably the reason why a lot of discussion about an "English only" SPIP site is considered as trolling. It's inherently a very political topic, and a lot of folk won't understand why the existing sites don't provide what anglophones say they need. You know, it works well enough for francophones, so why don't we anglophones just get off our asses and translate what's there already ?
The interface can be a bit weird sometimes, but the facilities are there.
This is a perfectly reasonable observation from francophones, and although I've made a handful of translations myself, I know it can be time-consuming and easy to overlook the utility of providing others with translations if oneself is able to read French anyway.
I also agree that contrib is full of material that will likely never be fully translated, not even into just English. With that in mind, and
given the power of SPIP in general, I would hope that we could use SPIP itself as the "wiki" engine to document SPIP, in the same vein as spip.net and the other major SPIP sites. As far as I can see, it's quite simple to maintain sections by topic without top-level language
sections above them, and simply use the articles/breves/sites that can be linked into and below each section and subsection. That's what we're doing already, no ?
If an article isn't available in my selected language, I think the "originale" article should be shown in it's place, with links to any other language translations available for the current article.
But that's just my personal observation, and it's somewhat variant from the status quo.
SPIP is a great tool, I see no reason to reinvent the wheel or use another CMS to maintain the wiki - it doesn't say much about a CMS if
it can't be used to maintain its own documentation.
The squelettes that result from reworking the sites would be MOST appreciated by anyone developing multilingual websites, and it's a great showcase tool to demonstrate the power of SPIP.
However, and this is a big however, this basically means reworking the existing squelettes on spip.net/ contrib / and probably a few other related sites - something which is not going to be very popular with the current user group and administrators of those sites. There's considerable work required to rebuild such things.
May I ask some questions here about creating "mirrors" of these SPIP sites and their content ? Is anyone going to be upset about maintaining a new database copy of this material ? How do we keep it synchronised ? Do we put "new site" English material back into the original SPIP sites ? Do we maintain file downloads on the new site ?
And is mirroring this material really the best way forward ?
Wouldn't reworking the existing "official" sites (namely spip.net (and subdomains) and spip-contrib.net) be a better long-term solution ?
As a translator, I'd rather just concentrate on the translation parts and leave the interface redesign up to others, but even there I'm not really sure why it's necessary. Why is it necessary, does someone know why ?
Anyone ? Bueller ?
Personally, I wonder what idealogical principles are motivating this, when I can really only point the finger at myself for not donating enough time to translate existing material already available.
I could also provide free hosting for a site, it would be great free publicity and all, but what's it all for, and how much of a headache is it going to become maintaining such an English-only site ?
Wouldn't it be better to work on integrating better, and unifying our efforts, than splitting our energies on mono-lingual efforts ? After all, there's plenty of Arab and German SPIP users about (just two examples, pardon me, if anyone is offended), and there's little point in alienating others by implicit exemption.
Oh, well, thanks for listening to my brain farts - do they help at all ?
Mark
----- Original message -----
From: "L'oiseau2nuit (ex- Zzz.)" <loiseau2nuit@no-log.org>
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 13:10:12 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Re: [Spip-en] Dedicated English website : where should we start ?
To: "Thomas Sutton" <thomas@bouncingorange.com>
Cc: spip-en spip-en <spip-en@rezo.net>
Hi there,
First of all, I'd like to thank everybody for their participation to this
question. There has been a lot of adices given there, most of them going
in the same direction and that's to be mentionned : we seem to agree on
quite the same points and specificaly this one :
- strenghtening translations efforts --> I'm ok with this. I do not work
on spip.net's trranslation efforts. Currently, I'm working on
SPIP-Contrib - SPIP's friends That's not so easy because, as for
many members of the global Worldwide Spip Community (hey, sounds great as
a name 
) I have also a paralel life that takes me a little time.
Fact is also that we are not so much, on spip-contrib, involved in this
translation work and, except some hands that people gave me on some
articles (by the way, specially here in this ML, thanks again 
or some
contributions that had been released by bi-lingual contributors, right now
this translation work on spip-contrib is not going on as fast as I would
like if ever I was really non-francophone.
Maybe implementing a translation interface (like the one existing on
spip.net) may help to fix this but currently, translating the whole
spip-contrib content would be a miracle, due to the fact that most members
of contrib do not seems to speak more than their own language, and that
the existing contrib are quite often updated (from one spip version to
another). That is not to facilitate the work.
Gilles's idea of a wiki that would concentrate all the links to english
parts of the documentation, plugin, etc... would help people like Thomas
Sutton to find faster what he need and what he feels as "missing things
that would make my work a lot 'cleaner,' if not easier and quicker."
And I have to confess that, even as a francophone, even after working with
Spip for 4 years now, I sometimes have the same feeling. (but that's
another story 
I also have to admit that some people on the french channels, seems to
think this debate is a troll, due probably to the fact this has indeed
been discussed before but I'm sorry I did not find anything that let me
know what had been told then.
For the moment, my 2 cents for contributing to the debate are right under
your eyes, and my other 2 cents to help people like Thomas are here -->
Programmable Search Engine by Google
let me know if first :
- this works or not : try some searches, tell me if the interface is well
in english or not (it should be !)
- this can help to get some information that were fisrt drowned under the
mass
- whatever you think about it (feedbacks, suggestions, ...)
Have all a nice day and thanks again for your answers
Etienne B.
On Mon, December 3, 2007 2:35 am, Thomas Sutton wrote:
Dear List,
First, please forgive the rather 'stream-of-consciousness' style of
this message. I am quite literally typing out my thoughts as they
happen. Also please excuse any ignorance regarding existing
facilities within the various SPIP sites and communities -- I'm still
only finding my way with SPIP.
On 01/12/2007, at 3:34 AM, Gilles Vincent wrote:
Hi,
On IRC has been recently discussed the opportunity of creating an
English-only website. It would be simple, easy to use. It's objective
would be for example to find rapidly the information for
documentation, plugins. But not only, it's just an idea..
Actually there is a lot of official websites for SPIP, each of them
related to a more or less specific part of our preferred CMS
Because we must start with something, which aspects best interest
you ?
I would really enjoy helping to develop such a site.
I would really like to see something along these lines -- I've been
frustrated on several over the last few months trying (and failing)
to find documentation in multiple places, the SPIP.org pages not
documenting everything, etc. Luckily, I have a French speaker who is
experienced with SPIP to fall back on, but it's still been fairly
heavy going at times. The opportunity to contribute something back
(if only a list of documentation with new material to be translated)
would be welcome.
In my personal opinion, perhaps the most useful aspect would be more
complete documentation of SPIP in English in a more flexible format
-- something to give us the ability to post comments and examples (a
la the PHP manual) and a little finer grained than a single page for
all of "SPIP's Filters". I don't know how the internationalisation
on, e.g., SPIP.org is organised, but having the documentation
articles split into smaller chunks would also make it easier to
translate it piecemeal and help ensure that we non-francophones see
*something* for every filter (for example), even if it's in another
language. Following a link to a page that doesn't even mention the
feature I'm looking for gets a little annoying.
A second feature of such a web site that I would *love* would be a
collection of articles describing best practice, SPIP's insides, etc.
After two months of working with SPIP, I still have the feeling that
I'm
Finally, in spite of these perceived short comings, I'd like to
express my admiration for everyone who has worked on SPIP and its
community.
Cheers,
Thomas Sutton
.Gilles
PS.:
Here is the list of the must-to-be-known websites (From Cam.lafit) :
<snip>
I hadn't seen most of these. Thanks
:-)_______________________________________________
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_______________________________________________
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