Extension:WiktionaryLang

WiktionaryLang is an extension under development by Hippietrail designed to add language awareness to the English Wiktionary.

Background
Most Wiktionaries support multiple languages by allowing multiple articles per page when words in different languages share an identical spelling.

Automation
The extension provides extra database tables which associate language headings with page IDs.

Interface

 * Special:Allpages has been hooked to allow listing articles by language as well as alphabetically.
 * Due to the free-form nature of wikis and the fact that languages sometimes have more than one name or spelling, a special page is provided to merge the variant headings under a single language ID so articles with "Farsi" and "Persian" or "Ancient Greek" and "Greek (Ancient)" will share a language ID. Incorrect and ambiguous language headings can also be marked.
 * A new magic word  has been provided.

Design issues
Special:Allpages can be very inefficient for large languages because of the ways SQL LIMITs and joins work. This could be improved by adding a crossindex to the database which records the article name and language ID in a single table.

Testing
WiktionaryLang is live at http://wiktionarydev.leuksman.com/ &mdash; please provide feedback there or on the talk page of this article.

Possible future features

 * Random article by language
 * Language index link at every language heading
 * User preferences to allow the user to select which languages they are interested in and show only articles and translations in those languages