About → Policies and guidelines → Babel → Internationalization → Start a new edition in another language Would you like to start an edition of Memory Alpha in your language? These basic steps are intended to provide an easy guide to setting up a localized wiki for Memory Alpha. There are four main stages to launching that should take a total of between five and ten hours of work (depending on how fast a translator you are).
Get involved
Before starting your own language edition, create an account and start editing on one of the existing editions. Get in contact with the existing community and let them know about your plans, preferably by adding your ideas to Forum: Other MA versions.
Initial translations
The following is a list of the most essential pages, the basic framework of a new Memory Alpha wiki.
- Main Page
- Memory Alpha: Introduction
- Memory Alpha: FAQ
- Memory Alpha: Copyrights
- Memory Alpha: Content policy
- Memory Alpha: Resource policy
- Help: Editing
- Help: New page
Translate these pages and publish the resulting articles on this wiki. You can use subpages of your user page for that purpose, and link to these pages from your language section at Forum: Other MA versions. You may also want to start translating an initial set of articles.
"Go live"
If the necessary translations have been completed, you can request the new Memory Alpha language edition on Forum: Other MA versions.
Our administrators will handle the rest and, typically, a new database will be created within a week. Before any additions are made to the new edition, a request will be made to Wikia staff to set the license to CC-by-NC, create the memory-alpha.org redirect, and add in the relevant interwiki links.
You will be granted administrator access to that new language edition. At the same time, one or more of the existing administrators, chosen by the international community and preferably those speaking the language, will be granted bureaucrat access. Stay in contact with the community and your co-administrators, as both will be able to help you in case of further problems with your wiki.
An administrator from the English Memory Alpha version will hold administrative rights on each international version in order to proper support necessary changes to CSS, JS, or Mediawiki pages.
Please note that all members of the Memory Alpha family are required to adhere the URL style for their basename (NS.memory-alpha). Other URLs will only be allowed as redirects (such as 'star-trek').
Further translations
Invite a few friends and online acquaintances (perhaps people you know from message boards or newsgroups) to help populate the initial pages of the new wiki. At this stage, the wiki is essentially functional, but it's mostly empty, and might be confusing to many visitors. You should now start translating other useful pages like these:
- Memory Alpha: Policies and guidelines and associated pages
- Help: Contents and associated pages
- Memory Alpha: Manual of Style
- Lists of Trek episodes and movies
- Lists of Trek main characters
As with the original English edition, you may wish to copy some policies from your language's version Wikipedia – just be sure to provide the appropriate credit! The MediaWiki User's Guide is a good place to get the appropriate material outside of Memory Alpha itself.
Promote MA
Add a link to the list of Memory Alpha language editions and read Memory Alpha: Internationalization to see what else needs to be done. Congratulations, your new edition is now ready for the public! Be sure to promote the new edition on appropriate message boards and mailing lists (but don't spam).