Any way to translate whonix document into Chinese?

Development
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I am willing to translate whonix document into Chinese, however unlike Wikipedia it seems whonix document site do not provide an option to create translated version. Is there any way to create translated version?

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Thank you for your offer!

Unfortunately, this isn’t possible. The available tools to allow translations of mediawiki web application based websites (whonix.org is using the MediaWiki web application, same as Wikipedia) have bad usability.

Teaching translators how to properly use the translation tool is too time demanding on the project. This isn’t doable without a dedicated contributor taking care of this type of technical support.

Previous developments:

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I see the problem, but can we solve this in a simpler way by create separate language sections? Like Whonix document English, Whonix document CN translation, Whonix document RU translation. Every section contains its independent document, and they can be normally edited by translators without a lot of troubles.

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That would quickly go out of date. Impossible to maintain knowing what is up to date what is outdated.

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This is true, but translated document will naturally lag behind original English without a large number of participants and this happens a lot in Wikipedia. However I think by allowing Whonix document to be translated into different versions and indexed by the search engine the advantage far outweigh the disadvantages, the Internet lacks serious anonymity discussion places like the whonix forum. Translating whonix document into different language versions will greatly increase the traffic to this site. It seems Whonix cannot find a good way to solve the translation coordination issue in a short time(just like other whonix TODOs that did not get solved for years), so I suggest we just start it right now and try to figure out management or merge problems later. Anything is better than never right?:slight_smile:

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Let’s see…

Did you see how comprehensive Whonix ™ Documentation is? Does it seem feasible time wise to translate it? How much of it?

The MediaWiki translation extension probably made no progress and remains a unmanageable usability mess. I have very little hope that would improve over the next decade. MediaWiki was amazing to get lots of great content contributed but there’s never been a great path to maintainable translations.

Wikipedia “solves” this by not using the MediaWiki translation extension. Wikipedia instead uses subdomains such as zh.wikipedia.org, pl.wikipedia.org and so forth. These versions are completely independent and any backporting improvements to the English version to other versions or forward porting for of other languages to the English version is a totally manually process and often not done. (Not sure terms backporting and forward porting here are correct.)

I am wondering how best to implement this for whonix.org and kicksecure.com.

  • A) One way would be wiki/Documentation/zh or,
  • B) instead of www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation (www subdomain) there could be zh.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation (zh subdomain). zh.whonix.org could be using a completely separate wiki database.

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  • A) I don’t know that would confuse search engines such as google and pollute search results. But much easier to implement since a manual process.
  • B) might be cleaner but a completely separate wiki database would miss out on CSS (layout, style) improvements unless these are manually copied form www.whonix.org to zh.whonix.org.
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After some little research it seems for google option A and B are pretty similar https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/managing-multi-regional-sites, so I think for ease of maintenance we should use A to implement that. Only need to add some menus and links on the current site structure.

I know Whonix document has many articles, but I can try to translate them one by one just like writing a novel. Also I am sure their will be some people interested in this anonymity project in Chinese Linux community, we only need to let more people know about whonix

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Hi Patrick I haven’t heard from you recently. Do you have time to edit the website right now? @CIAfisher is my old account, I broke my 2fa authenticator.

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https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/localized-ve is impossible to implement for me into mediawiki.

There’s no mediawiki specific guide how to implement this? And there’s no example wiki which implemented this?

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Sorry I do not know front end development at all. I will make a github blog first and host on it. These document pages are static anyway and search engine love github. Maybe someone who is interested in this will figure it out later.

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