For some reason, i'm not getting any mail from commons-l. I just found this reply to my proposal (Why not treat every page as a category?) in the archive and would like to answer it in the hope that the list will work now. (full quote, because this mail also goes to wikitech-l, as it is a request for a software feature)

Delphine (notafish) wrote:

OK, I think I get the idea now.

However, it still leaves open the discussion of multilingualism. If we want to allow for every language to put in their categories, or do a redirect, display will still be in whatever language has been considered default, and not of any use to non-default language speakers.

On another note, while this may work for images, the display of other media files will be rendered very complicated if those files are not self-comprehensive, ie. if they're not named accoding to their content, in a language everybody understands.

How do you plan to address that ?

Multi-Language-Support was not on my mind when I wrote that proposal. But thinking about it, I belive by adding a few more feature we would be able to cope with this, too. As I already wrote on [1], i would suggest the following:

1) It was much discussed that it would be good to show the link-title which is placed after the "|" in the category link in the category listing/as the thumbnail label, in order to have meaningful names in categories, especially for images. Also, as of 1.4 people can choose their preferred interface languag. We could combine those two features with the concept of named parameters [[...|foo=bar|...]] as used with templates:

Allow a category-link to look like this:

[[category:something|Something|de=Irgendwas|jp=....]]

giving a default label and labels for specific languages. Then, when building the category listing, use the label corresponding to the users interface language, if it is given. If not, use the default label. The label should be used for sorting, and should be shown as the link text/thumbnail label respectively.

2) Maybe one could even use the same concept to implement localized image labels: [[Image:Foobar.png|The Foo bar|de=Der Fuh-Balken|jp=...]] - that should not be too hard.

3) The one think still missing would be localizing the name of the page/category. Maybe an #ALIAS [[category:xyz]] directive could be added for categories (or the categorisation-aspect of pages, as by my original proposal): If #ALIAS [[Foo]] is placed in category/article Bar, plages and images added to cat Foo and to cat Bar would end up in the same "pool". The Pages for Foo and Bar would have different textual content and titles, but would list the exact same articles, images and subcategories. Subcategories would need some more thought, though, because in the german cat I want to have the german names of the subcategories, etc.

Dolphin already said on [1] there that he likes my first idea. what do you think? And especially to the developers - how hard would it be to do that?

d.

[1]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:VP#More_on_categories