language fallbacks on Wikipedia and co - Wikidata

Gerard Meijssen

15 Jun 15 Jun

11:53 p.m.

Hoi, Wil it work using the #babel templates? Thanks, GerardM On 15 June 2016 at 21:47, Lydia Pintscher <Lydia.Pintscher(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:

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Hey folks :) With the rollout of the ArticlePlaceholder one issue became very apparent: language fallbacks for them are needed - especially on the small languages - because otherwise you'll see a lot of Qs and Ps... We should have made this possible a long time ago but now with the ArticlePlaceholder it became more urgent. So starting in the next days you will see more fallbacks happening in Lua and the property parser function on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects using Wikidata data. It will use the usual MediaWiki fallback. It might need a purge for some pages initially to actually show up. If you see any problems popping up with this please let me know about it. Cheers Lydia -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Product Manager for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 10963 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207. _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata

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Gerard Meijssen

12:27 p.m.

Hoi, That would be only a partial solution. It would be good for people who are just reading. For people who have a #Babel template it is a disservice to provide them with a language they do not know. Any way, it is important to always show a label in any language. When someone is really keen, he or she can use google translate to understand better and possibly even add a label. Making the addition of labels easy is key in making this a success. Thanks, GerardM On 16 June 2016 at 12:12, Konstantinos Stampoulis <geraki(a)geraki.gr> wrote:

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Will and how the fallback languages will be configured? I guess that a per project configuration will be needed. Konstantinos Stampoulis geraki(a)geraki.gr http://www.geraki.gr ---- Συνεισφέρετε στην Βικιπαίδεια. https://el.wikipedia.org ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Οι παραπάνω απόψεις είναι προσωπικές και δεν εκφράζουν παρά μόνο εμένα. Το μήνυμα θεωρείται εμπιστευτικό μόνο εάν το έχω ζητήσει ρητά, διαφορετικά μπορείτε να το χρησιμοποιήσετε σε οποιαδήποτε δημόσια συζήτηση. Δεν έχω τίποτε να κρύψω. :-) 2016-06-15 22:47 GMT+03:00 Lydia Pintscher <Lydia.Pintscher(a)wikimedia.de>de>:

Hey folks :) With the rollout of the ArticlePlaceholder one issue became very apparent: language fallbacks for them are needed - especially on the small languages - because otherwise you'll see a lot of Qs and Ps... We should have made this possible a long time ago but now with the ArticlePlaceholder it became more urgent. So starting in the next days you will see more fallbacks happening in Lua and the property parser function on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects using Wikidata data. It will use the usual MediaWiki fallback. It might need a purge for some pages initially to actually show up. If you see any problems popping up with this please let me know about it. Cheers Lydia -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Product Manager for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 10963 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207. _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata

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Gerard Meijssen

4:16 p.m.

Hoi, When you show a text that is not of the language you make it hard to understand what it means. I hear you when you have a problem with caching but do you realise what problems you introduce when you show information that is not of that language? In my opinion you can cache everything that is of that language and show what is in a different language in a different colour. It would be better to show the information that is in a different language according to the #babel information and when there is nothing in any of those language just show something. I may be confusing.. In the major languages it is a problem that sorts itself out, in the smaller languages it is vital to show information that makes to the people that read the data. Consider for instance people that emigrated to all parts of the world. It is the only sensible way (not for computers but for people). Thanks, GerardM On 16 June 2016 at 13:46, Daniel Kinzler <daniel.kinzler(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:

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Am 15.06.2016 um 23:53 schrieb Gerard Meijssen:

Hoi, Wil it work using the #babel templates?

No, because that would be inconsistent with the fallback that is applied when using Lua or {{#property}} in wikitext. The fallback is based on the fallback that is defined by MediaWiki for the interface labnguages. In wikitext, we cannot use the Babel templates, because that would break caching. The rendering can depend on a few user specific settings, but caching a rendered version of every page for every possible combination of babel templates is not feasible. We could in theory use a different fallback mechanism on Special:AboutTopic, but that would be quite confusing - why does it look differently in articles? Also, when talking to others about the output of Special:AboutTopic, this might get confusing: if someone complains that e.g. some label they see there is wrong, and you go to the page but what you see is different, it becomes hard to discuss the issue. There would be no way to link to the page as you see it. Everyone would potentially see different output. -- daniel _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata

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Konstantinos Stampoulis

12:30 p.m.

(I accidentally pressed send before finishing) Fourth language is russian. https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageViewsPerCountry… This order does make sense when we consider the languages that greeks learn as a second language and languages of immigrants. In elwiki we already have infoboxes that display content from Wikidata and we hardcoded as fallback languages english, german and french (mostly because of the latin script). Either we should have a per project order of fallback languages, or redefine mediawiki interface fallback languages. Στις Παρ, 17 Ιουν 2016 στις 1:12 μ.μ., ο/η Konstantinos Stampoulis < geraki(a)geraki.gr> έγραψε:

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I believe that it would be nice to work with the #babel templates. After all, I guess that most of the editors bypass caching through their preferences. My concern is on language "fallback that is defined by MediaWiki for the interface languages". Probably it is not strictly related with Wikidata and the ArticlePlaceholder, but it will be important when content that will be displayed to readers, will be affected by this. I live in Greece and when I press the button to change interface language in any project, MediaWiki suggests english, pontic_greek, bulgarian, albanian, turkish, macedonian... With this row, when there is no english label the reader will get labels and names in languages and scripts not really understandable by most of the population. Readers from Greece read Wikipedia in english, greek and german, so it would make sense to have a fallback in these languages, thus german instead of bulgarian. Στις Πέμ, 16 Ιουν 2016 στις 2:46 μ.μ., ο/η Daniel Kinzler < daniel.kinzler(a)wikimedia.de> έγραψε:

Am 15.06.2016 um 23:53 schrieb Gerard Meijssen:

Hoi, Wil it work using the #babel templates?

No, because that would be inconsistent with the fallback that is applied when using Lua or {{#property}} in wikitext. The fallback is based on the fallback that is defined by MediaWiki for the interface labnguages. In wikitext, we cannot use the Babel templates, because that would break caching. The rendering can depend on a few user specific settings, but caching a rendered version of every page for every possible combination of babel templates is not feasible. We could in theory use a different fallback mechanism on Special:AboutTopic, but that would be quite confusing - why does it look differently in articles? Also, when talking to others about the output of Special:AboutTopic, this might get confusing: if someone complains that e.g. some label they see there is wrong, and you go to the page but what you see is different, it becomes hard to discuss the issue. There would be no way to link to the page as you see it. Everyone would potentially see different output. -- daniel _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata

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