2015-02-23 23:12 GMT+02:00 Bahodir Mansurov <bmansurov(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
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!)