User manual, translations, and more ...

[mwjames]

A well maintained user documentation is vital to explain on what Semantic MediaWiki is, it can do, and it cannot do but in recent years the translated documentation has been greatly diverted from what is available in English. To avoid widening the discrepancy, I hope that following changes to the user manual in general and preparation towards using the Translate extension will improve the situation now and in future.

• The navigation is no longer (and hereby its contents) tied to some fixed text and instead uses annotations and the tree format to generate an appropriate (in terms of the annotated language) table of contents.
• Language detection and annotation is done by SIL
• To improve the situation with the docinfo template, the Help:User manual page show cases the "new" doc.info replacement. The "old" docinfo template is convoluted and contains value annotations that seems hardly in use. Furthermore, document specific annotations have been moved into a subobject to isolate document management specific annotations.
• Also, content that seems beyond repair should be move into the Archive namespace to avoid contradictory assumptions about SMW functionality.

PS: I would have expected that in 2017, MediaWiki is sufficiently prepared to display content in different languages but unfortunately that is not the case as demonstrated in [0].

[0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T43720#3535150

[mwjames]

After I searched for a specific issue in [0], I just got so fed up that I hacked the page into chunks of consumable size.

[0] https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Selecting_pages

[kghbln]

Thanks a lot for all this work. I guess the last major page still unchunked it the one on inline queries.

[mwjames]

@WolfgangFahl Please see the notes above about the doc.info/ docinfo template use. Language annotations are also no longer associated with those templates.

[mwjames]

The ultimate objective is to use the translate extension for non-English pages since the translate system will show outdated content to a language. It has been the biggest issue for non-English pages since the start of the wiki due to lack of maintenance. @kghbln can tell you more about this.

[WolfgangFahl]

This is mostly all greek to me. I'd suggest to start with simpler things e.g.
making:
https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Categories
available in the Mediawiki:Sidebar
and cleaning up all those unused / undocumented categories.