WikiIslam:Translations

Shortcut: WITR

Translation Project

WikiIslam is an international site with editors and contributors from all over the world. Its policies and guidelines reflect this by requiring material to be tailored to accommodate, as best as possible, a universal audience. One of the major issues faced by sites that appeal to a universal audience is the language barrier. WikiIslam's Translation Project aims to rectify this by providing translations of its content in all languages.

List of Articles to Translate

Here is an initial list of articles that can be translated. These are popular pages or otherwise good candidates for translation.

Women

Muhammad

Violence

Science

Others

Short articles

Or choose any article from topics listed on the site map or navigate through the core articles.

Articles to Avoid

Although translations of most articles are welcome, there are a few that should be avoided.

Articles that need further work or are awaiting a complete rewrite.

Core articles. These contain quick summaries of issues with links to complete articles. Without first translating the linked articles, a Core article is useless. If you do want to translate a Core article and its linked articles, do this after the above list of important articles has already been translated.

Before beginning any translation work, please leave a message on the forum page or your own talk page mentioning what you would like to translate. This way the administrators can make sure you are not starting a project that is difficult to complete or is not optimal in some way. Important articles should be translated first.

Examples of Translated Articles

WikiIslam already hosts many completed translations in French, Turkish and other languages . Note that these pages retain their original formatting. To do this, simply press the "Edit" or "View source" tab at the top-right of the page you wish to translate, then copy and paste the entire thing into a text or word file. If you then translate directly from that file, you will retain all of the formatting.

Steps and Guidelines

Steps

After you choose what article to translate:

Login or create account: The first step for you would be to create an account (this way, your IP address will not be recorded in page histories). If you already have an account, you can login. When you are logged in, you will see your username at the top left of every page with various user specific links like My talk, Preferences and so on.
Go to Help:Contents. Translate the title of your chosen article and type that into the "Create Page" box. If any of these characters exist in the title, avoid using them: brackets, commas, colons, semi-colons etc. These can be added into the title later by using {{page_title|Desired page title}}.
After clicking "Create page" you will see a blank page.
Open another window. Then go to your chosen article and click the 'Edit' button. You will now see the text and all the wiki-formatting of the target article.
Copy and paste the entire thing into the new page you created. In Windows, Select all text and then CTRL-C; CTRL-V to paste.
You can now start your translation. Delete the English text as you go. You can also keep another window open which has the original article in a regular view (non-editable).
After you are done, you can preview or save the page. To make sure you do not lose your work, see the "Saving your Work" section on the Help page. You can also simply 'copy' all the text. You can also do intermediate saves if you have to interrupt your work, or if it is a long page.
To find what you have been working on, click the 'My contributions' link at the top right.

If these steps are difficult to follow, you can leave a message on the forum page with the name of the article you would like to translate and the new title of your translated version. An administrator will make a page for you with that new title with the existing English text that you can translate. Remember to save your work as you go (see the tips for saving your work).

Feedback on these steps is welcomed. Let others know on the forum page if these directions can be improved or if you face any difficulties.

Guidelines

Translations should always remain faithful to the original English work, retaining their scholarly tone and information. If for some reason you think a particular section should be left out or altered in the translation, discuss this with others on the talk page. The same applies for any additional information you may be considering to incorporate in the translation.

Future Plans and Updates

Future Plans

Sub-domain and interface support for languages (like on Wikipedia) is planned in the future for languages which have a large amount of articles. A rough guide for the amount of material needed before considering to launch a sub-domain would be a main page's worth of translated articles.

This project will begin with a single sub-domain. If it works well, the number of sub-domains will then be expanded to cover other languages. So, if you would like to see a WikiIslam sub-domain in your language, please join the WikiIslam Translation Project and start translating articles.

If you have any suggestions for this page or if you think a certain article should be added to this page, let others know by leaving a note on the forum page.

Updates

July 14, 2013:

Preliminary work on a Russian sub-domain (http://ru.wikiislam.net/) has been completed and the site is now officially open to the public. Russian speakers who are interested in helping the Russian WikiIslam's continued growth can contact the Russian site administrator on their talk page.