User talk:(WT-en) Nikolai35
Hey, Niko! Welcome to Wikivoyage. Please take a sec to look at our copyleft and policies and guidelines, but feel free to plunge forward and edit some pages. Scanning the Manual of style, especially the article templates, can give you a good idea of how we like articles formatted. If you need help, check out Project:Help, and if you need some info not on there, post a message in the travellers' pub.
Thanks a ton for signing up for the French Wikivoyage Expedition; I'm excited to see this go forward. By the way, this is your user talk page; it's the way we send personal messages to other users. Anyone can see it, however, so don't say anything too personal here that you want to keep just between you and me!
To answer some of the questions you sent me by email:
- No, it's not necessary to wait for "final" versions of English articles before translating. First, they're never really final; they just get kinda "stable". Second, we want contributions from French speakers to articles in the French Wikivoyage, even if the info they're sharing isn't in the English guide yet. That's maybe the main benefit of having language versions -- we get contributions from monolingual non-anglophones. So it's a process of gradual growth on both sides of the language barrier, with bilingual people copying info back and forth as time goes on.
- No, there's not a warning or indicator to show if the page you're looking at has been updated in another language. That would be really useful, however, especially for bilingual people who make it their job to translate between guides. I'll look into it.
- Yes, I have thought somewhat about differences between Québecois French and French from France, but I don't have a good idea what to do about it. The same problem exists for Swiss, Belgian, African and other francophones who aren't from France. With the English version, we standardized on American spelling, mostly because we had to pick one thing for consistency. I know that French Wikipedia has a lot of social problems around this issue, with non-French francophones getting treated somewhat as inferiors. I'd like to avoid that with French Wikivoyage. Maybe we should name it "Francophone Wikivoyage" to make it crystal clear that it's not all about France? Also, isn't there a so-called "Français Internationale"?
- As to markup: well, yes and no. I probably freaked you out pointing you to the LanguageFr.php page, since it's a big mess of PHP code. Don't worry about that stuff. We use a special, very simple, markup technique called Project:Wiki markup to make it easy to mark up a page. Generally, though, you don't have to use it. If you make just regular paragraphs of text (separated by blank lines), they show up just fine. Other people can come in and add markup if they want. You should experiment a little with the Project:Graffiti wall to test it out a bit. It seems complicated at first, but it's really pretty damn easy.
Let me know if you have any more questions! With you getting involved, we've got the necessary group to get things going, so we'll be doing a French Wikivoyage real soon now. --(WT-en) Evan 17:05, 7 Feb 2004 (EST)