On 6/6/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
I don't understand that. Interwiki links are the hard and fast en:Article <-> de:Artikel relationship. Are you unaware of iw links, or am I misinterpreting what you're saying? Maybe you could give an example?
They're not always 1:1. One topic might be given a whole article on one Wikipedia and only a paragraph on another. I'm not aware of any convention for handling that atm actually.
For those situations where we *don't* have an article on the same topic in multiple languages, we don't have an interwiki link, and we wouldn't link the categories.
I suspect categories are much less comparable across languages than articles are, due to different conventions etc. But I don't really know.
Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes against the intention (this in the context of which languages should have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well). We don't have a British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both understand each other well enough to communicate. If it were *possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language while keeping the content the same, we'd do so. It just isn't, at least not with current technology.
Is there an official or even unofficial policy on this? I have wondered. IMHO, the Wikipedias should *not* be precise translations though. For example, [[en:Personal pronoun]] should give descriptions of personal pronouns in all languages, but with emphasis and examples from English. [[fr:Pronom personnel]] should similarly have an emphasis on French, because that is the most helpful for French readers. Whether that extends to cultural matters (should French articles on cartoons draw more on examples from French cartoons such as Asterix than on manga for instance) is up for debate.
OTOH, interwiki links already give us the automatic translation in terms of category information. Yes, there will probably be some article titles and category titles which don't translate well, but that's the exception and for those few titles we wouldn't have any iw links anyway.
More research needed.
Steve