Translations of the Webmin documentation wiki

Howdy all,

If you haven't been following what's going on over at the Webmin wiki ( http://doxfer.webmin.com/Webmin ), I've been spending quite a bit of time improving the Webmin documentation, along with some amazing help from users Rob Roy and Arent (seriously, those are two of my favorite Webmin community members!).

Something that's bothered me for a while has been the lack of native language documentation for Webmin and Virtualmin. The UI has been translated to quite a few languages (with varying degrees of completion), but the docs are almost entirely in English only. So, tonight I spent a few hours learning about internationalization and translation in MediaWiki, and got the Internationalization extension bundle up and running. This is the same set of tools used by WikiPedia, and the very nice KDE UserBase wiki, to handle translations.

Now, I don't speak any language other than English well enough to write documentation (though I've been practicing my Spanish a lot lately, I still have months to go before I can write technical documentation). So, I'd like to ask a favor of folks who use Webmin and are fluent in a language other than English: Go check out the Webmin wiki and see if you can help add translations.

An administrator (that's me or Rob Roy, right now), needs to add a few tags to pages to allow them to be translated, and so only a few pages are translatable at the moment (it's super late here, and I need to sleep!). But, over the next few days, I'll be picking the most important module pages and marking them for translation. Eventually they'll all get those tags, but because Webmin has so many older modules that nobody ever really uses anymore, I think it's very much worth focusing our efforts on the popular modules.

Check out one page I partially translated (using existing translations from Webmin): http://doxfer.webmin.com/Webmin/Modules/es

MediaWiki has really has great tools for translation and internationalization. It may be that we end up moving the Virtualmin documentation into the Webmin wiki going forward, or integrating a MediaWiki into the new Drupal site, for that very reason (Drupal has I18n, but it's nothing like the MediaWiki capabilities).

Anyway, if there's a page you want to translate but can't because it hasn't been enabled yet, let me know! I don't want to stop anybody from doing cool things, like translating the docs!

Cheers,

Joe