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I am trying to setup a multilingual encyclopedia (4 languages), where I can have both:

  • Articles that are translations of other languages, and
  • Articles that are in a specific language only.

As the wiki grows, I understand that the content of each language can vary.

However, I want to be able to work as fluently as possible between languages.

I checked this article, dating back to 2012, which has a comment from Tgr that basically condemns both solutions.

I also checked this Mediawiki Help Article, but it gives no explanation about the differences between both systems.

My questions are:

1- what is the preferred option now for a multilingual wiki environment that gives the most capabilities and best user experience, given that some of the languages I want are right to left, and some are left to right. So I want the internationalization of category names, I need to link the categories their corresponding translations, and want users to see the interface in the language that the article is written in.

So Basically as if I have 4 encyclopedias, but the articles are linked to their corresponding translations.

2- Which system would give me a main page per language? So the English readers would see an English homepage, and the French readers see a French homepage..etc?

EDIT:

I have a dedicated server, so the limitation of shared hosting is not there.

Thank you very much.

Atef Wagih
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The Translate extension is meant for maintaining identical translations and tracking up-to-date status while other solutions (interwiki links, Wikibase, homegrown language templates) typically just link equivalent pages together. Translate is useful for things like documentation, but comes with lots of drawbacks (for example, WYSIWYG editing becomes pretty much impossible and even source editing requires very arcane syntax). It's best used for content which is created once and then almost never changes.

You cannot get internationalized category names in a single wiki as far as I know. (Maybe if you wait a year or so... there is ongoing work to fix that, by more powerful Wikibase integration.) Large multi-language wikis like Wikimedia Commons just do that manually (create a separate category page for each category in each language).

Tgr
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    Thanks @Tgr. I ended up setting up a wiki family [using this settings here.](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family#Multiple_wikis_sharing_common_resources). It limits the number of languages you can translate to (based on the installations you have), but it is the most stable system I could find. – Atef Wagih Apr 20 '17 at 01:04