In reply to Yaroslav's suggestion about using the interwiki links and bots to help keep articles maintained and spread new information across Wikipedia; Yes absolutely that is what the Death anomalies project does, and now that we've proved that the concept works it is worth expanding on. Merlissimo has already expanded the bot's report from the original of "people who are alive according to your project but dead according to another project" to various other less serious age related biography anomalies. The technology works, thousands of articles in dozens of languages have been improved, and it is ready for rollout to other sorts of maintenance scenarios. But currently we only have seven projects requesting reports, the Latin, Slovene, Finnish, Swedish, Gaelic, German and English language Wikipedias, we extract data from around seventy other language projects, so if the anomaly is because of an error in say the Italian Wikipedia then I or someone else might well correct it. But if someone is dead according to our French article and living according to articles on the Chinese, Bangla and Afrikaans wikipedias then it wouldn't currently be picked up as an anomaly as none of those projects have yet requested a report at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table <hint>
On the downside I'm loathe to turn this from an anomaly report to a bot message to talkpages. Many editors don't have all unicode fonts installed on their PCs, and the subtle message of "do not use Wikipedia as a source, treat this as an anomaly where one of the matched articles may have a reliable source, or may have had an unsourced change, or may have been vandalised" in my view is safer as a maintenance report than a bot message.
If you want more info come to Haifa and sit in on http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/cooperation_across_diffe...
Also I think it would be cool to have scripts/bots etc that:
Told you if anything on your watchlist had been updated on another project.
Listed articles without picture on your project that had interwiki links to articles with pictures on other projects.
Changed the colour display of interwiki links when you looked at an article if one of the other language versions of an article had more recent info, more info, images or just on some fancy algorythm was probably better than the language version you were looking at. especially if in your user preferences you could choose which other languages you were interested in.
But all those things would take some investment in writing. It took the Slovene wikipedia just a few days from requesting a death anomaly report to receiving and clearing it.
WereSpielChequers
Message: 1 Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 19:03:56 +0400 From: "Yaroslav M. Blanter" putevod@mccme.ru Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] interwiki links To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: eab5e06ae02af915db22c07648b71ed2@mccme.ru Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:02:22 +0200, "Amir E. Aharoni" amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
2011/3/23 WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com:
But how would this process handle situations such as the EN wiki article [[David Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley]] having an interwiki link to the DE article on his late mother? Currently this comes up as a death anomaly because one is living but the other deceased. Would the central repository handle such linking by showing such links as redirected, or would we continue to have such anomalies? Or would DE wiki consider it an error to link these two articles?
It should be an error to link those two articles, but in reality links to a section in another language are quite common.
I don't really have a clever solution up my sleeve, but putting the links in one place will likely make these situations easier to handle but allowing the editors to focus on content and ontology, without worrying about updating a long list of links in a lot of projects (and no, bots don't always help).
Actually, this is not an answer, more like a question, which may be well related to the issue. May be it has been discussed earlier but I am not aware of such discussions.
We have a number of standard types of renewing information. These are for instance (the list is by far not complete)
- deaths (I guess this is why this Deathnote project started);
- elections and government changes at all levels;
- changes in administrative divisions (for instance here in NL they split
and merge communities several times per year);
- sporting and other records changing: for instance A was a record holder
but then lost her record to B.
Now obviously not all of these changes get reflected in all language editions immediately. Obviously one can be sure that when a new US president gets elected or a new chess world champion wins the title, this information gets spread over all articles on a scale of hours, sometimes minutes. I am less sure about the elections of the mayor of Recife or splitting a third level administrative unit in Inner Mongolia into three. On the other hand, Portuguese Wikipedia is likely to have an up-to-date info about the mayor of Recife whereas Chinese of Mongolian ones would record the administrative change in Inner Mongolia. Then it can take months or even years to make to other Wikipedias. Is there any way we can automate this? For instance, having a central data bank for this type of changes and sending bot messages into talk pages of relevant articles in all languages?
Cheers Yaroslav