Help:Contributing/languages

The knowledge base is multilingual on a best-effort basis: en, fr, eo. Multilingualism works in two places: inside entities — labels, descriptions and aliases — and on wiki pages, as static translated copies. Contribution is never blocked on translation: write in the language you know; translations are produced separately.

Entities and properties

Items and properties are single entities: there is exactly one page per entity (for example Special:EntityPage/Q1), shown in the reader's interface language. The multilingual content lives inside the entity as per-language values.

Field	What it is	Example (property P1)
Label	The short, human-readable name of the entity	instance of
Description	A one-line clarification that disambiguates the entity	that class of which this subject is a particular example and member
Aliases	Alternative names or spellings that also resolve to the entity	example of

House rules:

• A label and a description must be unique together per language: no two entities may share the same label + description pair in the same language.
• Do not copy Wikidata property numbers — properties are mirrored and mapped via equivalence statements instead (see the ontology alignment decision).
• Prefer the local, human-written value over a machine translation; if you use a machine translation, review it against the original before saving.

Workflow

To add or edit terms in another language:

1. Open the entity (for example Special:EntityPage/P1) and enter edit mode.
2. Open the "In more languages" section at the top of the page.
3. Choose the language, type the value, save.

Every field takes a language code (for example en, fr, eo) and the value for that language.

Wiki pages

Pages are written in English as plain wikitext — no translation markup. A translation is a separate static page at a language-suffixed title (Page/fr, Page/eo), maintained by hand with machine-translation assistance. A

This page is a translation (language ?). It mirrors the English original as of revision ?, dated ?. If it differs from the original, the original is authoritative.

banner at the top of a copy records which English revision it mirrors, and a

Languages: English · français · Esperanto

bar on the English page lists the available copies — the bar is included automatically on every content page, so you never add it by hand. The English original is always authoritative.

Copies are created only once a page has settled editorially — translating a page that is still being restructured is wasted work. Browser machine translation complements, never replaces, the static copies: fr is covered in all browsers, eo only in Chrome.

Producing and maintaining translations

• Translator — how copies are produced, kept in sync and verified

See also

• Help:Contributing — contributing to this wiki
• Help:Contributing/code — code blocks and syntax highlighting
• Help:Contributing/languages/translator — producing and maintaining translations