Am 02.05.2015 um 11:32 schrieb Thomas Douillard:
Yes, that's what they are for, but wikidata is far from beeing complete, and if there is no label in your language, showing next to the original name a transliteration in your language could prove useful. I can very well imagine situations where it is unclear on how to say a Chinese name, for example. Putting a label in french can somewhat be a hard task, for example.
Automatic transliteration is already implemented and used. You will notice if you set your user language to sr-el for instance (Serbian using latin alphabet). However:
* Transliteration is currently only supported between a handful of language variants, like the different scripts for Serbian, and various variants of Chinese.
* Transliteration (and language fallback in general) is only applied inside statements, not for editable labels, descriptions and aliases at the top of the page. It's unclear hoe language fallback should interact with editing.
* Transliteration (and language fallback in general) may not work correctly in qualifiers and references at the moment.
So, the general mechanism is already there, the question is just how to improve an apply it. It seems to me that we could use transliteration support for more languages, and that we should figure out a way to apply it to the "main" label and description shown at the top of the page.