On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 2:33 AM, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
For a few months now i have been thinking about
writing an email with
my thoughts about disambiguation, so i guess that now is the time.
I've been doing a lot of work improving interwiki links, mostly
manually. There's a grave problem with adding interwiki links to
disambig pages - very often a word that may be homonym in one language
is not a homonym in another or has a completely different set of
meanings. Examples of different kinds are abundant:
Simple cases would be:
...
* Due to the peculiarities of Hebrew spelling, דאון (pron. "daon") can
be interwiki-linked to the various meanings of "down" and "daun" and
also to [[Glider]] and [[Flying fish]].
Disambiguation pages are a harder case, but it think it could be applied
to the whole interwiki linking.
For the most part interwiki, linking between encyclopedic articles,
categories, portals and policy pages is immensely useful. There are
problems with them, which i am trying to solve in interwiki projects.
They are currently active in a couple of smaller wikis - eo, oc and
ru. I am also ready to roll them out in nn, fr and es soon. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WPIW/HE .
I haven't set one up yet in en.wiki, as it presents certain technical
limitations, but i will do it one day.
Disambig pages are indeed a special case. These pages are too language-specific.
* A link to a
disambig page can be made in a different color, and thus
help the editors to fix it.
I think there's a bug for it, just waiting for a
patch with no
efficiency problems.
* It will clearly separate between purely
technical and homonymic
disambiguations and those that have some encyclopedic meaning. The
latter can go to the article space. ([[Cancer]] is a possible
example.)
How do you differenciate between types of disambiguations? :S
Discussion, as in any other case. The [[Cancer]] example comes from a
he.wiki user who supported my proposal about separate namespace but
thought that ambiguity of Cancer is relevant to many languages. From
my experience, such cases are a minority.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni
heb:
http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng:
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
cat:
http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus:
http://amire80.livejournal.com
"We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace." - T. Moore