2015-02-23 23:12 GMT+02:00 Bahodir Mansurov bmansurov@wikimedia.org:
I had a talk with Amir and we came to a conclusion that WikiGrok is more or less translatable. The key is to write well defined qqq statements.
*1. "Do any of these tags apply to ____?" where the blank can be anything, person, place, thing, etc.* This is the trickiest part because the unknown word is in the objective case in English and looks the same as in the nominative case, but in other languages it may not be the case ;). We can ask translators to make this sentence as generic as possible if the unknown word may take multiple suffixes. For example, in some language the above sentence may take this form: *“___ is described best by which of the following tags?”*, which puts the unknown word into the nominative case.
Yes. I cannot think of anything smarter at the moment. It's pretty much impossible to write something that will decline article names perfectly in all languages. English is "lucky" not to have grammatical cases, so it seems easy. But in any case, just starting with something with $1 as the article name is OK.
Putting it in quotation marks shouldn't be necessary, because the sentence is supposed to talk about this as about an object and not as about a title of a page that describes the object.
*3. What do we do with 'Instance of' and 'original language of the work' tags? Should we abandon overriding them?* We should keep overriding these expressions and let translators know that our overrides sound more natural and they are free to override default Wikidata properties if they wish.
If I understand correctly, "type" was chosen because "instance of" sounded too technical. It is too technical in a few other languages as well and not only in English, but in some languages they are OK. So by default they should be pulled from the name already available in that language in Wikidata, and the translatewiki translators should have the opportunity to change them.
It's extremely important to explain this in qqq: link to the property page in Wikidata, explain where it will be used and include a screenshot (IIUC, you already have one). Just put the screenshot on Commons and use the usual [[File:]] syntax to include it in qqq
(As a bonus, another idea that I floated in the conversation with Bahodir is that if there is no translation for the property names, you could ask people to type one. I'd love to crowd-source property name translation!)