I used the interwiki links all the time in this manner at work, and still do. It was one
of the things that turned me on to Wikipedia and caused me to start contributing, and
eventually to register an account.
As others have said, if the interwiki links had not been visible by default, I likely
would not have discovered the feature, or discovered it only much later.
An interesting thing is that even if the interwiki articles were poor, or incomplete,
there was usually enough context provided to pick out the key terms in the field in the
relevant languages, providing a starting point for further research and confirmation in
and outside of Wikipedia. Extremely useful.
Even today the articles that are of the most practical benefit to me are very often
C-Class or stubs.
Andreas
--- On Fri, 4/6/10, J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov <alexandrdmitriromanov(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
From: J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov
<alexandrdmitriromanov(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Friday, 4 June, 2010, 9:27
Me three for using the interwiki
links as a way of finding the word or
phrase I'm looking for in another language (along with
Wiktionary). Not only
do they assist me in finding translations of the words or
phrases I am
looking for, they also give me context and relevant
material for languages
I'm comfortable using. They are also particularly useful
for languages where
I am not at all comfortable (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic)
where I get
results with images of the subject that confirm that I have
found the right
noun I need.
Sometimes I get false positives, but unlike with my various
dictionaries
which I now rarely use, I can usually figure out pretty
quickly that I have
not got the translation I need.
I'd be interested to know what the default languages I
would get based
computer profiling. Geolocating would put in me in Morocco
(official
language Modern Standard Arabic, though French is commonly
used), browser
configuration would give French, and Wikimedia system user
preferences are
set in English, simply because I predominantly use the
English Wikipedia and
English Wikinews; I'm far too lazy to have to translate the
Wikimedia
terminology in my head when navigating in French, German or
Russian.
AD
2010/6/4 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com>
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only
one that frequently
> uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a
big
translating
> dictionary? I've found it to be much
more
useful than automatic
> translation engines for mathematical terms
(both
more comprehensive
> but also in that it makes it easy to find
the
translations for many
> related terms). The hiding doesn't make
this any harder for me, but
> it would make me a lot less likely to
discover
this useful feature.
Of course not, I do this all the time (I even
wrote about it), but I
don't have any idea how many non-wikipedians
use the
interwiki links
in this manner. On the list of research projects
I
wish someone would
get around to: I would love to know more about
unexpected/atypical
uses of the projects like this... I guess the
reference desk is a
similar feature, an unexpected service cropping
up in
the middle of
the encyclopedia. I wonder what others there
are.
-- phoebe
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l