On 06/06/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Looking a bit into this, I agree it'll be a hurdle. How big of a hurdle I still don't know.
Just fwiw, one simple basic example I have dealt with.
[[fr:Carnac]] discusses both the township of Carnac and the famous Carnac stones which are found within the town.
I split [[en:Carnac]] into that article which only discusses the town, and [[en:Carnac stones]] which discusses the megalithic site.
[[en:carnac]] and [[en:Carnac stones]] both interwikilink to [[fr:Carnac]]. However, nothing (anywhere) interwikilinks back to [[en:Carnac stones]]. There is no clean mechanism for doing so. The French article *could* link twice - once to each article - but then you'd just have two interwiki links labelled "English" and only the URL would tell you which was which.
In other words, many -> one correspondances are ok. One -> many are unhandled atm. Occasionally you'll see "French Wikipedia article" given as a "further reading" link but I don't think the MoS sanctions that.
This is basically what I was talking about upthread, but Steve explained the fundamental issue better than me... the scope of articles in different languages isn't a 1:1 correspondence.
The problem with language and cultural issues isn't with neutrality, or whether-or-not something gets written about, it's how it gets written about. Indeed, the "cultures" aren't really differences between Danish culture and Japanese culture - they're differences between the internal culture of the Danish wikipedia and that of the Japanese wikipedia.
In some projects, the use of broad-scope articles may be much more popular than in others, so you have one article on X mapping to three or four on Y. And different groups have different preferences as to how to do these broad articles. In the case of [[Carnac stones]], it could rationally be part of a broader article organised on a geographic basis ([[Carnac]]), a thematic basis ([[Standing stones]]), or a historic basis ([[Prehistoric monuments]]).
I honestly don't know if this is the case. But I'm betting that, to some degree, it is... or it is enough to screw up any kind of cross-project categorisation program.