On 23/09/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I have proposed in the past that we could have a form of redirect which I would call a 'hard link'. This is an analogy to Unix-style "symlinks" versus "hard links". There are some reasons this would be good, and some reasons why this would be bad, and in any event, the idea has never gained much support.
Yes, I was about to post something about that very issue - one of the main issues, underneath the heated debating, seems to be that if you search for/visit/follow a link to the page "aubergine", you get a large heading saying "Eggplant", which seems to bias the page towards that name. I don't think there really *is* such a bias, and all variants of the term are bolded in the first sentence of the article, but it is annoying that one should take precedence in the title itself.
The problem with the "hard link" concept (a fairly neat analogy; the point for those less UNIX-savvy being that both titles have equal status, neither "redirecting to" the other) is that if linking to "aubergine" displayed "Aubergine" as the header, it would actually become *more* of an issue which term was used in *other* articles. That is, the difference in *effect* between the two links [[aubergine]] and [[eggplant]] would be that much more noticeable.
Of course, this would be a non-issue if we adopted the habit of always mentionning all synonyms whenever we linked to the article (which I personally think would be unwieldy and ugly); or, indeed, if we had an automatic converter (which I'm currently rather sceptical of working). But even with neither of those, it would perhaps be an improvement on current practice.
And it would *definitely* be better than having two articles with the same content but for a copy-and-paste - which I see absolutely no reason we would not end up with if we implemented a split-article or split-wiki solution. Thinking about it, in an ideal world, all "Wikipedias" would actually have the same content - it's really a shame that so few people are multilingual that they have eached developed into such separate entities.
In practise, I would say there are two main reasons why, say, the French article on aubergines contains different content from the English one: 1) Not enough people capable of and willing to translate between the two 2) Slightly different policies (e.g. the French allow recipes) because the difficulty of holding together a single multi-lingual community has led to what might be described as a "highly federal" structure... Oh and, of course, 3) Laziness. ;)
The practical application of which thought is that neither (1) nor (2) would present a barrier between en-us and en-gb [or "en-commonwealth" or whatever] wikis, because nearly all users of either would in fact be "bilingual", with merely a preference for one or the other. (3), of course, would still play a part, but given the number of people willing to correct interwiki links, by-pass disambig pages, etc, I can well imagine a group of "translators" (armed with bots) springing up to keep the two in sync. It does seem rather a waste of their time, though - since the end result would be two copies of exactly the same article, with for the most part only subtle linguistic differences.
although it does seem that the Americans have achieved a sort of dominate in the vegetables, while losing out in the sports/games area.
I'm not sure why, but that rather made me laugh.
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]