On 10/5/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
"About images"? I don't quite understand - they're generally concepts, the way that categories in a Wikipedia are.
I think he meant "populated by images". Not a big deal.
[[de:Henri Oreiller]] [[fi:Henri Oreiller]] [[fr:Henri Oreiller]] [[it:Henri Oreiller]] [[no:Henri Oreiller]] [[pl:Henri Oreiller]]
Now, when I translated that from French to English, theoretically I should have updated all the other interwiki links as well. But that's a lot of work. Bots help a bit, but a central repository would be "the next level".
I agree that it would be nice if this exact same list existed in some "language neutral" location and you could just add [[en:Henri Oreiller]] to the bottom of it, which would, in theory, trigger some sort of internal process to purge the cache of all seven articles so that they infallibly show six interwiki links apiece after a moment's time. This would be even more helpful for topics where the number of languages has just increased from say, 59 to 60.
Sounds a bit hit-and-miss. I think we should be moving in the direction of attempting to actually encode higher levels of meta-information, rather than attempting to deduce such information by heuristics.
There may, of course, not always be a quid pro quo for whatever reason.
1. Difference in growth curve from project to project. This will resolve itself in due time. Not a big deal. 2. Semantics: speakers of language A may draw a clear distinction between the concepts denoted by terms AX and AY, which may translate to language B as BX and BY, but be used interchangeably in the latter language. 3. For some topics, the English Wikipedia has a "salted" page or a protected redirect while other languages have a proper article.
Ah, I think you've misunderstood. I'm suggesting using a direct link to Commons, so in this case, either [[commons:Horse-ripping]] or [[Commons:Category:Horse-ripping]]. Not using the article's category.
I sense that this is the new [[meta-syntactic variable]] meme for this mailing list. Lovely.
I should have been clearer: I really do mean the Wikipedia article, no the Commons image page. So it would (in this hypothetical, perfect tool) edit the article text to add the new image for you.
If placeholder images were more widely used and/or if infobox syntax was more standardized, this would be easy to do. Failing that there's always [[Image:$1|thumb|{{subst:PAGENAME}}]], which I put somewhere in the article when adding a commons image to an article on a project whose language I don't speak a word of. Somebody else can shuffle things around later. The important thing is that editors of the article know that the image is available to them.
There is of course the {{commons}} template in every language which links to an equivalently titled page on the commons. For topics where a different title is used in every language, that means somebody on commons ought to create a buttload of redirects (inevitably pointing to La Lingua Anglofonica) to ensure that everyone (literally) ends up on the same page.
Of course if there was a way to work the commons page into the shared interwiki list (stored, once again, somewhere in no man's land) this too could be made easier.
Alternatively, if my "upload from URL" extension were enabled on commons, it could fill in the entire upload form. The user could check the wikitext before uploading, and upload under his own name with a single click.
I think the "upload under his own name" concept is problematic when you're uploading images that aren't self-made.
I think he means "under his own user account". Not a big deal.
—C.W.