On 8/30/07, Andrew bouncey2k@gmail.com wrote:
I was wondering "what about a requiring-language template?"
For example we could add in the information template - in the description field - the main language-templates:
{{Information |Description = {{de|...}} {{en|...}} {{es|...}} {{fr|...}} {{it|...}}
When a language-template is not filled it could appear
en: description of XXX fr: *description in french language required* it: descrizione di XXX ecc..
When a language is missing, the picture could be automatically put in a category like [[Category: French description required]].
The problem with this is that nearly every image on Commons needs to be translated into some language. The only images that are consistently translated into more than 5 are the featured pictures and pictures of the day, but considering how many files Commons has that is certainly a small percentage.
Categories such as you describe may seem like a good idea, but they will contain about (very very vague guess here) 95% of all the files we currently have; at 1,828,506 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Statisticsfiles and counting, that is a lot of files to have in a category. The only category that will be less full would be the "English translation required" category, but that one will have quite a number of files as well.
I think a better way to do it is probably to increase awareness about translation efforts, ask for volunteers to translate images as they come across them, or even let other-language wikis know that their contributors are more than welcome to come to Commons and translate the description of a file they are using. If every person who comes from it. or fr. or de. or ru. or zh. (etc. etc.) wiki to find a picture for a new article on their wikipedia translated the descriptions of the 5 - 10 files they come across in their search, that would be a huge help. If there are 200 people from other-language wikis coming to Commons every day to look for images, each look at at 3 images and translate the descriptions, that's 600 new translations per day.