Hoi,

When you see a label in Reasonator, you will find that when it is not in *YOUR* language, it is underlined in red. You can hover over a label and you will be prompted to add a label in the named language. ONLY your language. Wikidata being Wikidata can provide the option as it already does to see multiple labels for the languages as selected in the #Babel template. That is the obvious place to see and edit labels in multiple languages.

When you think that language fallback in Reasonator is "easy", it is very much because the options have been considered properly. It does provide fall back in a user specified manner. It does show all the labels used for an item but it does NOT provide an option to edit them. It could, but this is left for Wikidata itself just like adding statements has been left to Wikidata.

There are three parts to an item in Wikidata. Labels, statements and links. It is best imho not to complicate things and leave this partition in place.

Thanks,

GerardM

On 4 May 2014 22:17, Daniel Kinzler <daniel.kinzler@wikimedia.de> wrote:

Am 04.05.2014 09:00, schrieb Lydia Pintscher:

> On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 1:28 AM, Joe Filceolaire <filceolaire@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Where are we with fallback languages?
>>
>> I did a session for new editors with Magnus last weekend and one of the questions that came up was why one of the students couldn't see most of the labels - he had his language set to British English. He asked why there was no fallback to international English.
>
> The status is that we have a plan for the next steps. I realize it is
> important but currently not doable in the next say 3 months.

I would like to add some information about why language fallback is not as
easily done as it may seem. Fallback for *display* is simple enough (as
reasonator proves) - but we allow editing, which makes this much harder.

Consider the case of a user with their language set to "en-gb", but seeing a
label in "en" due to fallback. What should happen if they click "edit"? Which
label will they be editing, the "en" one or the "en-gb" one? They should really
be able to do both, and the consequences of their edit should be obvious to
them. When automatic transliteration comes into play, as is the case with some
chinese variants, things become more complex still.

This is not impossible to solve (e.g. by showing edit boxes for all the relevant
variants, with some additional information), but needs careful design. This
cannot be done overnight.

-- daniel

--
Daniel Kinzler
Senior Software Developer

Wikimedia Deutschland

Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.

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