Editing explain xkcd:Translation

Translations are a thing that are going to happen, as a fair portion of the world does not speak English as a first language. This project page aims to organize efforts surrounding the localization of the wiki. From pure traffic statistics, our first translations are likely going to be in German and French. We won't officially start translating until we've [[explain xkcd:Incomplete Explanation of the Day|purged]] all the [[:Category:Incomplete explanations|incomplete articles]] from the wiki, so that volunteer translators will at least have a base to work from if they don't get any of the comics. 

==Scope==
Here's a few scope issues we need to agree on.
*What should the URLs be?
::www.de.explainxkcd.com and de.explainxkcd.com for Germany, www.fr.explainxkcd.com and fr.explainxkcd.com for France, other countries could be easy covered by this subdomain.
:::Sounds good. I've never seen a site in the form www.de.explainxkcd.com though. Wouldn't de be the domain? Wouldn't that be expensive?
::::When someone does own "explainxkcd.com" a domain like "whatever.explainxkcd.com" should be a simple task.
:::::Yeah, I can totally do that. I'm not sure www.de.explainxkcd.com is how domain names work though.
*Image translation
::Manipulating an image is a heavy task, a translated transcript would be a better solution. The (weak English reader) can see the original image but also the translation.
:::Workload is little issue, we can use surplus ad money to pay for translations if we need to, and we can recruit existing translation projects to join us. I'm not *really* doing translations for people who already speak English, I'm shooting for translations so that people who don't know English can access xkcd as well.
*Template translation
::No need. I'am hating translations like "From - To" to "Von - Bis" (From - Until) like IBM does. Templates should work in the same manner without no translation.
:::That would mean that templates like [[template:incomplete]], [[template:unsigned]] and [[MediaWiki:Talkpagetext]] would remain in English though. Izzat good? I think I put this point up mainly because there's two ways we could go about this; we could recreate the templates in each translation wiki, or we could move them to a pool wiki to be shared by all the wikis. Probably should have mentioned that earlier. This applies to images as well.
*Should we keep the original English comic data around on our translation wikis?
::That's my point, showing just a translation, not a new comic. Most people understand English but they just do not understand the details. That has to be translated.
:::I doubt the wisdom of that logic. If that were the case, our current visitor count from non-English speaking countries should be much larger, but it stands at maybe a bit more than a quarter of our viewership right now. I'm pretty sure that America/UK/Australia are not 70% of the world's population. A good portion of other countries clearly isn't touching xkcd or explainxkcd, for whatever reason, and I think it's probably safe to say that language plays a major part in that.
::::Most German people know English, but not in that detail.
:::::Looking up {{w|List of countries by English-speaking population|Wikipedia}}, that would be ~64% of Germany. That's not counting Austria, Switzerland and Belgium, two of which appear to have lower rates of useful English knowledge than Germany. Also, I wouldn't assume that people want to learn or know English when they access our translated offerings.
*Local admins - currently, we have no visible candidates to manage the French wiki, and two eligible Germans. Identifying viable candidates will be difficult for current admins, as I do not believe any of us actually speak French.
*Shared data - I'm only planning on sharing login data between the translation wikis, because pretty much everything will need translating. That means contribution history and existing pages will not be carried over, and templates will need to be manually carried over.

Feel free to edit this page and its talk page to bring up anything else I may have. Given the projected starting trigger of full article completion, we'll probably start opening the translation wikis up for public editing in about {{PAGESINCAT:Incomplete explanations|R}} days. In the meantime, we'll work on getting the parallel wikis set up and making sure that they aren't broken.

;Some thoughts:
*"www.de.explainxkcd.com" and also "de.explainxkcd.com" are valid domain names. I can provide help on this DNS config.
*That names require a "Virtual Host" at the Web-Server itself. Just some configurations, not a big job.
*Right now I think a fully independent wiki instance would be the best solution. Means: Translating all templates and 42 and more...
*The translated page should look similar to the original explainxkcd page, but if a translated image is shown a link to to the original image must be available.
::Welp, I actually did some research and you appear to be right on domain names. So, seperate images as well? I can do that. We should also start mocking up the translated comic template now to see what works from a UI standpoint. There's another thing to go on my list for things to do during Thanksgiving.
:::For the images both versions should be be available, if exist. Like "File:new_study.png" and "File:new_study_de.png". If DE exists it should be the default, otherwise the original. In this case the user should be able to switch between the original and translated image. I will do some tests at my local wiki and I will present some ideas at a Sandbox at my user page here. But nevertheless this is a project for 2014.

{{comic discussion}}