On 13/08/12 16:37, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
The problem is that the mayor's name can be written differently in other languages. I didn't actually try running it myself, but as far as I understand, Wikidata supports translating names. But what happens when the mayor changes? It is likely that the name will be updated in the language spoken in that city. At that point articles in Wikipedia
This is correct, albeit in general mayor will not be a name, but a link to an item, and the item will contain his name (in various languages).
in other languages will probably show the name in the language of the city, which may be unreadable.
Let's take Haifa for an example. Its previous mayor was: he: עמרם מצנע en: Amram Mitzna ru: Амрам Мицна hr: Amram Micna etc.
Now it changes to: he: יונה יהב
And then suddenly all the articles about Haifa in all the languages will show the mayor's name as "יונה יהב", which most people won't be able to read. Maybe the Wikidata community will develop some kind of a policy that will discourage adding names in local scripts without any translation to a more common script. Maybe at some point software should even show a warning if somebody tries to do it.
I believe it should be possible to alleviate this problem to an extent by introducing automatic transcription between languages and specifying what language the mayor's "default" name is in. If automatic transcription gets it wrong, it could still be overriden when someone enters the name in another language.
Relevant bugs are https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37461 and https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36430