David Gerard wrote:
Yeah. The common usage of interwiki links on en:wp is "that article over there is roughly equivalent to this one." I have seen en:wp articles pointing to two de:wp articles, quite reasonably. They are designed to be useful, but are only useful to the reader going from one place to the next one. The next link is in no way guaranteed to be useful in the same way.
If A and B are close friends and A and C are close friends, only a mathematician would think that *should* mean A and C are close friends. They might well be, but there's no reason at all to presume so.
C'mon, even mathematicians have common sense, sometimes :) A mathematician would simply say that the relation of being a close friend is not transitive. Thus, if the interlanguage links were to mean "roughly equivalent", then it wouldn't be transitive and it would be unsound to perform a transitive closure. In other words, if the links are interpreted as "roughly equivalent" then you're absolutely right: it doesn't make sense to do the analysis that I've done.
The point is, according to the policies (at least the way I interpret them) and according to some bot authors and probably according to a large share of users, the interlanguage links do represent equivalence. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Interlanguage_links http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Interwiki_linking#Interlanguage_link
Besides, note that multiple interlanguage links from a given page to a given language edition are discouraged (although partially supported by the MediaWiki engine). If the ILLs were to mean "similarity", then multiple links to the same language wouldn't have been discouraged (an article can be "similar" or "roughly equivalent" to more than one article in another language edition).
Summing up, IMHO the intended meaning of ILLs is "equivalence", and it's supported by four arguments (two links, "discouraged multiple ILLs" argument, and bots).
Another thing is that some of the ILLs are clearly incorrect even using the relaxed interpretation (like June 26 -> June 27, Rick Ankiel -> Japanese language, Tap (valve) -> Griffin, listed in the other post).
Regards, Łukasz