Hello,
I've drafted my proposal about language fallback and conversion issues
for Wikidata at [1].
Currently Wikidata stores multilingual contents. Labels (names,
descriptions etc) are expected to be written in every language, so
every user can read them in their own language. But there're some
problems currently:
* If some content doesn't exist in some specific language, users with
this exact language set in their preferences see something meaningless
(its ID instead). This renders some language with fewer users (thus
fewer labels filled) even unusable.
* There're some similar languages which may often share the same
value. Having strings populated for every language one by one wastes
resources and may allow them out of sync later.
* Even for languages which are not "that similar", MediaWiki already
has some facility to transliterate (aka. convert) contents from its
another sister language (aka. variant) which can be used to provide
better results for users.
This proposal aims at resolving these issues by displaying contents
from another language to users based on user preferences (some users
may know more than one languages), language similarity (language
fallback chain), or the possibility to do transliteration, and allow
proper editing on these contents.
Although Wikidata is in its fast development stage, lots of data have
been added to it. The later we resolve these issues, the more
duplications may be created which will require more clean up work in
the future, like what we had to face before / when the language
converter (that transliteration system) was introduced for the Chinese
Wikipedia. So I'm planning to do this project in this summer.
There's also a backup proposal about category redirects at [2]. I
wrote it because I really want to see it implemented too, either by me
or someone else. Some of its contents may be also useful for other
participants willing to do this project.
Comments are welcome and appreciated.
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Liangent/wb-lang
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Liangent/cat-redir
-Liangent