On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni(a)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Hebrew name than the outdated guy.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.