Help:Languages

MediaWiki, the software that runs Project: Redcap, is configured so English is the primary language of the site. Support for additional languages is through the Languages template. Project: Redcap added support for multiple languages on 9 February, 2014.

Finding Pages in Your Language

Every non-English page belongs to a category named after the two-letter international code for that language. For example, all German pages belong to Category:de because the language code for German is "de". The one exception is English: the maintainers did not think it was worthwhile to add an "en" category to every English page when the default language of the site is already English.

You can find all the current language categories in Category:Languages.

Creating a Page in Your Language

Thank you for your interest in creating a new page on Project: Redcap. Our language policy page has some useful advice on what to write. This page explains how.

First, decide what to call your page. Do you want your page to be a variant of an existing, English page, or do you want the page title to be in your own language?

Variants of English Pages

It can sometimes make sense to create foreign-language versions of existing English pages. Two possible cases are when the English page is very important, such as the Main Page or maybe the Fan community page; and when the English-language page is already named after a Latin term, like Creo or Quaesitor.

1. Find the language code for your language.
2. Create a new sub-page of the English page you want to start from. A sub-page has the name of the parent page, followed by a slash, followed by the name of the sub-page. The name of the sub-page must match the Wikipedia language abbreviation. For example, to create a Chinese version of the Main Page, the sub-page would be called Main_Page/zh
3. Add a language category to your page. The category should be named after the two-letter abbreviation for your language. So the Chinese version of the main page should have [[Category:zh]] appearing in the text. Do not worry if this category does not exist yet; the Wiki will create it when you save your new page.
4. Finally, go back to the parent page and add the {{languages}} template at the bottom, if it is not already there. The Wiki will automatically add a link to the sub-page you created.

Creating a Page With a Title in Your Language

Sometimes, you may want to create a page whose title is in French or Hungarian instead of English. This is a similar process to creating a variant of the English page.

1. Create your page with the title you want.
2. Write the content of the page.
3. Add a language category to your page. The category should be named after the two-letter abbreviation for your language. So the Chinese version of the main page should have [[Category:zh]] appearing in the text. Do not worry if this category does not exist yet; the Wiki will create it when you save your new page.
4. Add the {{languages}} template at the bottom of the page. The Wiki will automatically add a link to the sub-page you created.

Technical Aspects

To properly create a non-English page, you will need to understand language codes and character sets.

Language Codes

Every language has a two-letter code that MediaWiki uses to identify it. For example, the code for English is "en" and the code for Spanish is "es."

The list of language codes may be found on this page at Wikipedia. Languages not appearing on that list are not supported, yet.

Accents and Extended Characters

It is my understanding that MediaWiki supports Unicode characters, but I have had trouble finding documentation that says that explicitly. If you run into problems with Unicode support, please contact me. -- Andrew Gronosky 9 Feb. 2014 18:50 GMT

Further Help

You may find the documentation for Template:Languages useful.

Feel free to contact the maintainers if you need some assistance getting started. We are very eager to see languages succeed on Project: Redcap and we will gladly spend the time it takes to help you.