TODO: Look at what Olaf said (transcribed on the "Message" page) and see how it can be threaded in here.

TODO: Mention the main technical insight, i.e. don't have to bother with tracking pieces of text.

Massively collaborative sites like Wikipedia are revolutionizing the way we think and deal with content creation. This is bound to have profound impacts on the way that we think and deal with content translation as well (Desilets 2007... this would be my Aslib keynote).

In particular, it raises the question of how to go about collaboratively translating content that is collaboratively created and ever changing. This is a situation that many community-built sites find themselves in. For example, SUMO, the Mozilla Support community had been using traditional techniques for documentation until recently. When they decided to move to wiki documentation, they faced an important problem with content localization.

Translating content in this sort of environment presents a number of unique challenges, compared to translation in more traditional environments (Desilets et al., 2005):

• Impracticality of imposing a master language, and forcing all original contributions to be written first in that language.
• Ever changing nature of the content which may never reach a "final" stage.
• Difficulty of enforcing timely translation into all target languages.
• Non-professional nature of many of the volunteers doing the translations.

In this paper, we describe features that were implemented in the TikiWiki engine, in order to facilitate this sort of collaborative translation of wiki content. These features can be compared to the LizzyWiki system (Desilets et al., 2005), but they innovate in several ways:

• Support truly multilingual sites as opposed to bilingual only.
• Allow original modifications to a page at any point in time, rather than require pages to be synchronized.
• Implementation in a full-featured wiki engine, instead of developing a prototype proof of concept.
• Provide insight to readers regarding the up-to-dateness of a particular linguistic version of a page.
• Record complete translation history to allow translation behavior to be studied.