A topic may have several language versions, all refered to by the same topic name, distinguished by an optional language suffix (.en, .de, .it, ...). If a topic is referred to without language suffix, it's created or displayed in the user, web or twikis default language in that order. A user may specify which languages (s)he speaks, an existing topic which has none such version lead to an oops saying so and listing available language versions. If there are multiple versions the best one is choosen. What beeing the best choice actually means is not clear to me, especially if the contents of a topics language versions differ (see below).

Each language version may differ from others not only in language, but also in content. This is not desirable, but also not to much of a problem if the meanings of a topics languages version don't depart too much. If the do, they may be splitted, if both branches are good.

For important topics, or if a wiki wants to be equally available in all languages, a concept of topic maintainers for a set of languages and topics could be introduced, which notifies a translater that a topic needs re-translation.

This is probably some work, but it would be very desirable for non-english or multilanguage environments.

Alternative solutions

I thought a while about how to achieve the same goal without changing twiki itself, but I did not find a satisfying solution.

-- MichaelUtech - 20 Nov 2001