Many wikis cater to a single language target audience. When enough users decide they want to use the wiki in their own language, an offshoot of the original wiki is started (eg. WikiPedia). The various offshoots can be more or less tightly integrated with the original (eg. using InterWiki).
Another option is a true multilingual wiki -- one site where the various pages, or even various parts of the same page use different languages. The benefit for multilingual users is that they can search for information in other languages easily. The drawback for monolingual users is that many pages listed on RecentChanges are not usable.
Further discussion:
- MultilingualWikiGoals -- social aspects: integrating language minorities and language dominance
- MultilingualWikiTools -- technological aspects: from character set to filtering of recent changes lists
- MultilingualWikiExamples -- stories, existing sites, etc.
- MultilingualProsAndCons -- advantages and disadvantages of going multilingual
- WhatMotivatesPeopleToTranslateWikiContent -- what might motivate people to spend what appears to be a lot of time into translating wiki content?
- MultilingualWikiHowIsItDoneToday -- how do people go about producing multilingual content today?
Worth scanning to see how the rest of the world is adapting to multilingualness is JournalOfComputerMediatedCommunication, [vol.9(1)] special issue on multilingual issues.
CategoryWikiTechnology CategoryGlobalization CategoryUncommonWikiTechnology