Hello,
In the german wikipedia some people are doing a hell of work in internationalizing - linking to the english and esperanto wikipedia mainly. (If someone wants to help out: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seiten%252C_die_nicht_ins_Englische_linken http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seiten%252C_die_nicht_zu_Esperanto_linken
- it's more than 10 000 articles)
Therefore I thought about a tool for it, which would make this work a lot faster and more comfortable. A demo (doing nothing, only visualizing the idea) can be found at: http://www.djini.de/Uploads/internationalisation.html
Please can someone implement something like this?
I have been thinking about this kind of thing myself as well - at the moment we have 2 Wikipedias where such links can be added, but in the near future there will probably be 5 or 6. Having a simpler method than working in each separately for adding links would be very much preferred.
However, I think that a bit more than this would still be good. In the first place, the restriction to only 3 languages is quite strict in some cases, and as soon as you want to get more in, the amount of work blows up.
Secondly, blindly inserting those in the page would cause disasters, IMO. In my opinion the software should check for: * Existence of the pages that are being included. If one of the pages does not exist, error message * Whether the link already exists. If the link already exists, don't add another one * Whether there already exists a link to another page in the same language. If it does, an 'are you sure?' question should be added.
In the third place, your choice of languages is rather small. Where are Polish, Spanish and Dutch? And what about Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Italian, Catalan? Or all those smaller Wikipedias?
This is not to say the idea is a bad one, more to say what I would think would be the best way to implement it.
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For the long term, I think what we would like is to get those interlanguage links out of the pages and instead have something like a separate Wiki where all themes (or at least all themes that are on more than one Wikipedia) can be found, with perhaps a stub of information but mostly an overview of all pages on all Wikipedias that discuss the subject. The pages on the Wikipedias would then be linked to one (or more) of these 'interwikipedia' pages, and get information about what other language pages to link to there. Perhaps there could also be information about what subjects are related.
But that's all something for the (far?) future - a tool like you propose would not be as powerful, but a lot simpler to create.
Andre Engels
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