multilingual Coordination

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

This page is a short introduction to the Wikipedia's multilingual concepts. The main central place for the coordination of all the Wiki projects (in any language) is the Meta-Wiki (located at meta.wikimedia.org). The mailing list to coordinate Wikipedia across different languages is Wiki-l. See also the English Wikipedia's embassy, a page for non-native speakers.

We are aware that many of the world's 6,500 languages are not well-represented on computers or the web, and we are committed to working with language speakers and computing organizations to support as many languages as possible.

Each language in Wikipedia currently has a separate set of user accounts. Links between articles in different languages are called interlanguage links or interwiki links.

The URL of the Wikipedia for a given language is xx.wikipedia.org, where xx is the 2-letter language code as per ISO 639. For languages without an ISO 639 2-letter language code, the 3-letter language code is used, or if that also does not exist, a custom 3-letter language code is made. (On the mailing list and in discussion, people often write xx: to mean the xx-language Wikipedia, as in I'm a regular on fr:.)

There are currently 288 Wikipedias, counting the English Wiki English.

See m:List of Wikipedias on Meta for a full list.

See meta:Language proposal policy for a tutorial on how to get a Wikipedia language edition started, and meta:Manual for small and new Wikipedias for the first steps