Here's an idea that I will conclude (at the end of the post) isn't such a good idea. But it's worth thinking about.
As an extra line of links at the bottom of *every* page on *every* Wikipedia, have this:
Read and edit an article on this topic in: English -- Castellano -- Deutsch -- Francais -- German -- [etc.; the various languages we have]
One simpleminded suggestion would have it that at the bottom of http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Foo , these links would be to, for example, http://es.wikipedia.com/wiki/Foo and http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki/Foo , etc.
The problem of course is that "Foo" is not a word in Spanish. :-) Or if it is, it probably means "rutabaga" or is very rude. It requires very specialized knowledge, which cannot be automated, to know where those links should point.
So *can* we interlink similar pages between the various international Wikipedias, in order to foster cross-pollination? If so, how? Well, I have an idea that requires *minimal* programmer involvement (always a plus for overworked programmers!).
Describe the new page here.
<font size="-1">[Castellano] -- [Catalan] -- [Deutsch] -- [English] -- [Esperanto] -- [Français] -- [Hanyu] -- [Italiano] -- [Ivrit] -- [Nihongo] -- [Português] -- [Russkiy] -- [Svensk]</font>
Note, the names are given in their own languages, so the text can be used with all new language wikis; we'd could use this same text for all the wikis.
What I'd like to have is some commented-out instructions right before the list of languages (and *that* would have to be translated) but I'm not sure there is any way to write comments in wiki-markup! But, anyway, we'd have something like this:
<!-- Please don't remove this notice! If you identify an article on another Wikipedia on a topic that corresponds exactly to this article's topic, then, please, won't you add the URL of that other article, so that the language name below points to that article? -->
Even if this comment notice can be added, the one big problem with this sche me is that people just won't go to the trouble of putting in all the links. In fact, that's probably the case--enough that perhaps we shouldn't go to the trouble of doing this.
But maybe I'm not thinking of something here...maybe what's needed is a new text box with special bells and whistles, but that's not going to happen anytime soon, I'm sure.
Anyway, so my conclusion is that we shouldn't do anything along these lines yet (unless someone can think up something brilliant), but eventually, we might...
Well, one idea is just to make links on the [[Foo]] page point to a corresponding [[Foo]] page on the other wikis; then, on those other wikis, redirect [[Foo]] to the correct word in the other language. In THAT case, we should change the commented-out notice above.
Larry