What I wonder here is this, what is the motivation for linking to English articles for every single internal link?
Wikipedia practice - on all existing Wikipedias - is to link to the local version of an article, even if it doesn't exist yet.
The reason for this is that somebody who clicks on the link will be invited to write an article, rather than be forwarded to an English article.
Right now, I think an outsider would go "this Wikipedia isn't in chiTumbuka, it is almost completely in English", rather, the intention is to make it obvious that those pages don't exist and invite people to create them which is currently not what happens.
Mark
On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 17:52:39 -0500, Stephen Forrest stephen.forrest@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Dinette,
On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:49:55 +0200, Mamma Mia dinnette@softhome.net wrote:
...and Gerard, the links in the articles entered in the form: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITEM A B C etc] keep on disappearing. We can't have an articles to all the relevant links in Tumbuka (not within a short time, anyway) hence the references to the English relevant entries. What could be causing that, someone deliberately changing them or does the system change links automatically to the form [[ITEM A B C etc]]?
I'm not sure I understand you. Are you saying that links entered in the chiTumbuka wikipedia, in the form [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITEM A B C etc], are being rewritten somehow as [[ITEM A B C etc]]?
If that's happening automatically, that's a problem. One possible solution is, instead of entering them as
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITEM A B C etc]
to enter them as
[[:en:ITEM A B C etc|ITEM A B C etc]]
For example, I believe [[:en:Canada|Canada]] will point at the English wikipedia version of the article on Canada from any wikipedia (French, German, chiTumbuka).
Hopefully using the wikipedia-style link above will prevent the automatic replacement from happening. Additionally, you might want to include some kind of notice to readers that the link they're about to follow contains English text (in case they don't read English).
Regards,
Steve
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l