Hi Ravi,
Thanks for writing about this reverse use case for our new language search
detection, it is an interesting point.
I'm not sure that we'd want to automatically add in the English wikidata
links to all the language wiki's because I'm not sure that those users
would want that, especially in the wiki's that use the Latin alphabet.
For instance - on the Tamil Wikipedia, would users search for 'wolf' or are
they really looking for a Latin transliteration of the Tamil word for wolf?
If so, it would mean that the search would be trying to phonetically match
English queries to non-English articles. For names - this transliteration
is often the same, but for other things they're generally not the same at
all.
I've cc'd the Discovery email list to see if there are additional thoughts
and feedback on this question.
Cheers,
Deb
--
Deb Tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
IRC: debt
Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 5:46 AM, Ravi <ravishankar.ayyakkannu(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi,
Regarding
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/07/27/wikipedia-language-search
:
There is actually a need for a reverse use case. If someone searches in
English in Tamil Wikipedia, it should detect the correct Tamil article.
This can be implemented using Wikidata links. Many non-roman script
(especially, indic language users) language Wikipedia users search in
English inside the search box. They actually hope to see an article in
their own language. Just that they could not type in their own language.
There are some Wikipedias which actually create 1000s of redirects with
English titles to solve this problem.
Ravi