On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Hallo,
Preamble 1: This email probably falls under this FAQ question: Q: How will Wikidata change the way articles are edited? A: That’s part of what we have to figure out during the development, together with the community.
Preamble 2: It's possible that there's an answer to this issue already, but I couldn't find it.
A popular example of using Wikidata is that it makes maintaining articles about cities easier: When a mayor of a city changes, it must only be updated once.
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 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
That's a very good point. I would expect WikiData to link the field not as a plain property, but as an entity with ( he: עמרם מצנע, en: Amram Mitzna, ru: Амрам Мицна, hr: Amram Micna)
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.
That's unfortunate but if the position changed, it seems better to show the Hebrew name than the outdated guy. It may be appropiate to do some filtering .so that one language is marked as the source, and has to be present for that item, though. It would be very suspicious that we only knew the name in Russian, when dealing with Haifa.
In the best case, we would already have the entity for the running candidate, (supppose they were instead presidential elections) and the translation would be available on switch time.
The scenario can be even simpler: Somebody will vandalize Wikidata and change the mayor's name to some nonsense.
WikiData would amplify the effect, but it would be no different than any other vandalism.
(...)
Another question is: What is the fallback mechanism if a name was not translated? The usual MediaWiki fallback rules can be reused, but there's a twist, because in Wikidata the usual fallback language may be unavailable. So in this case it will probably be:
my language -> my fallback language -> English -> the language in which it is written
As a sidenote, it would be interesting to make MediaWiki fallback rules able to work with a non-English base language.