[Wikipedia-l] interwiki conflicts discussion

Hello everyone, Interwiki conflicts are a pain. Bot operators receive warnings about them, but often do not fix them, probably because they are reluctant to tamper manually with projects in languages that they don't know. The result is that groups of interwiki-linked articles remain unmaintained. One technical solution that may ease this pain is Nikola Smolenski's "Interlanguage" extension. The central hub for its discussion is this page in meta: * http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_newer_look_at_the_interlanguage_link Being very eager about interlanguage linking, i decided to Be Bold and opened a MediaZilla request to enable this extension in Wikimedia projects. It is supposed to be discussed on wikitech-l. However, this is only a partial solution. Enabling this extension will make resolving conflicts technically easier, but it still must be done by a human editor. I am studying linguistics and i have a pretty good intuition for guessing the content of Wikipedia articles in languages that i don't know, so i often make thorough fixes in interwiki conflicts across different Wikipedias. Automatic translation sometimes helps, too. However, i cannot really know all languages and i cannot be familiar with all the different policies and cultures of different projects. Finally, it's way too much work for me to complete all by myself. Therefor, a culture of discussing this between Wikipedias needs to develop somehow. (Other Wikimedia projects can participate in this, too; i am familiar mostly with Wikipedia.) In another Being-Bold initiative, i started this page in meta: * http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_synchronization It's a very preliminary and experimental page. I have many more ideas about it, but it's a start. You are already welcome to comment on the case that i opened there, "Black box"; comments from French speakers are particularly needed. You are also welcome to add cases of your own. You are welcome to write a bot that will automate the implementation of the discussion outcomes. Etc. I hope that a new era of interwiki links is beginning. -- 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