Hopefully this wouldn't require a fork of Mediawiki.

Mattis Manzel wrote: Or more difficult. I think the idea is full of naïve optimism about translation in general, and machine translation in particular. Begin with an English text and translate it into another language. Have someone else, who cannot see the original, translate it back into English. Compare the two English versions. The difference can be amazing. On another level, articles on the same subject are often separately developed in each language. This can often result in having stable NPOVs in each language that are different, frequently in the wake of careful negotiation over the exact meaning of a word. Reconciling these could be extremely difficult. I can easily imagine that attitudes toward US foreign policy might not be as conflicted when written in many languages other than English. En _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Mattis Manzel wrote: Or more difficult. I think the idea is full of naïve optimism about translation in general, and machine translation in particular. Begin with an English text and translate it into another language. Have someone else, who cannot see the original, translate it back into English. Compare the two English versions. The difference can be amazing. On another level, articles on the same subject are often separately developed in each language. This can often result in having stable NPOVs in each language that are different, frequently in the wake of careful negotiation over the exact meaning of a word. Reconciling these could be extremely difficult. I can easily imagine that attitudes toward US foreign policy might not be as conflicted when written in many languages other than English. En _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 20:11:36 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote: I see your point that bots can help; my point was that they can't do so automatically. A bot would have to inform a human that both 'Germanic language' and 'German language' were encountered, and the human would have to take action based on this. What I suggest is to have a language-independent 'linker' page maintained in a separate namespace. (Maybe 'meta' or something new, e.g. 'interwiki'). All it would consist of is a list of interwiki links, with the meaning that any page named on the linker page was to be taken to be an equivalent for any other named page. Under this new scheme, suppose I'm reading the English wikipedia article on 'Germanic languages''. If I then notice a link to [[da:Tysk sprog]] and fix it, I will be editing this linker page. If the previous error had been propogated into other wikipedias, they will have their link corrected immediately, without having to wait for a bot or human to spot the bad link and fix it. Some more advantages: 1) Since interwiki changes would then be changes to the linker page, they would not add volume to the changelist history of linked pages. 2) There would be fewer anonymous edits to wikipedias. Right now, if I want to add an interwiki link to a language I don't speak, I won't bother creating an account, because I wouldn't particularly benefit from having one. In this proposed system, I would merely need to have an account on 'meta' or 'interwiki'. 3) The bloat factor of interwiki links on pages would be reduced. 4) The problems with broken interwiki links caused by a wikipedia munging foreign characters entered as literals in the input would be more easily fixed. I've seen a few interwiki links to Cyrillic wikipedias appear as, for example, [[bg:????????]], probably because someone tried to copy-paste a literal character from one page to another, and their system didn't support the character set. Hmm, that was a bit longer than I intended. :) Again, please feel free to give me feedback on the above idea, or redirect me to the appropriate forum to post it if this isn't it. regards, Steve _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 20:11:36 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote: I see your point that bots can help; my point was that they can't do so automatically. A bot would have to inform a human that both 'Germanic language' and 'German language' were encountered, and the human would have to take action based on this. What I suggest is to have a language-independent 'linker' page maintained in a separate namespace. (Maybe 'meta' or something new, e.g. 'interwiki'). All it would consist of is a list of interwiki links, with the meaning that any page named on the linker page was to be taken to be an equivalent for any other named page. Under this new scheme, suppose I'm reading the English wikipedia article on 'Germanic languages''. If I then notice a link to [[da:Tysk sprog]] and fix it, I will be editing this linker page. If the previous error had been propogated into other wikipedias, they will have their link corrected immediately, without having to wait for a bot or human to spot the bad link and fix it. Some more advantages: 1) Since interwiki changes would then be changes to the linker page, they would not add volume to the changelist history of linked pages. 2) There would be fewer anonymous edits to wikipedias. Right now, if I want to add an interwiki link to a language I don't speak, I won't bother creating an account, because I wouldn't particularly benefit from having one. In this proposed system, I would merely need to have an account on 'meta' or 'interwiki'. 3) The bloat factor of interwiki links on pages would be reduced. 4) The problems with broken interwiki links caused by a wikipedia munging foreign characters entered as literals in the input would be more easily fixed. I've seen a few interwiki links to Cyrillic wikipedias appear as, for example, [[bg:????????]], probably because someone tried to copy-paste a literal character from one page to another, and their system didn't support the character set. Hmm, that was a bit longer than I intended. :) Again, please feel free to give me feedback on the above idea, or redirect me to the appropriate forum to post it if this isn't it. regards, Steve

One question worths investigating is whether there is any case when links are not desired to be two-way: Article A1 links to B2 but B2 doesn't want to link back to A1 (or wants to link to A2 instead). I don't know whether there is such a case, maybe someone of you knows one.