Hello, All!
As you know,
not all languages presented in Wikipedia
by comparable amount of articles.
There are "rich" languages as English and German,
and there are not-so-rich as Russian, for example.
It is not good, but it is also not bad. It's just the fact.
Some language sections lacks terms already defined in many others.
Also, in Russian there is many notions,
mostly very modern Hi-Tech-related,
which lacks "canonical" translation to Russian,
but have a well-established form in English.
I am sure that in other languages the problem exists too.
Wiki propose no means, AFAIK, how to deal with notion
having no canonical term to represent it in some language.
Even existing ways known to me to circumvent the obstacle
are not convenient (see below).
Let us consider some not-so-rich language,
which will be denoted as "current" from here and below.
Suppose that its Wiki section is actively developping.
What an article editor should do if he has to use a notion
that should be defined, but no article on that notion exist
in _current_ language section?
An editor may have no time to make a new article,
he may doubt in desired article's title
because he do not know the most correct term,
or even if he is sure in the word used in the place,
he could be unsure in title of the _nest_
to which this word has to be belong
(there are situations where making separate articles per word is bad).
There are now only 3 ways:
use some words but skip definitions (which is poor),
make a new stub article (which is time consuming
and could cause future conflicts),
make some "external" link at least to another Wiki language section.
Now I propose a new feature that will aid
to exploit existance of other Wiki languages,
but not just with a [[:lang:term]] link.
Like [[:lang:term]], we should select a "default" language to fallback,
but this default will be used more sophisticately
than merely redirect the reader to the article denoted.
Suppose a construction similar to [[:lang:term]], like
[[:&en:some rare term|non-English term]]
( with English as "default" in this case ),
which, in case of browsing,
has to be interpreted in the following manner:
* Compose some special URL for a "lingual fallback" href;
* When such URL GET, retrieve specified article in "default" language;
* Extract from there the trailing list of interwiki links,
* When detecting a link to the current language, consider this fallback obsolete,
start some automated process replacing such fallbacks by "normal" links,
and end up redirecting browser to this "normal" article;
* Otherwise, give to the browser
the list of interwiki links plus the link to "default" language article,
means the list of languages where desired notion is defined by now;
* Also give a prompt to create the missing article
under some _suggested_ title (e.g. link text where the fallback originates from),
but not a _fixed_ title choosen earlier.
* Let user make his choice manually;
* Maybe, add a delayed browser redirect to one of these links,
possibly to default language's one,
but generally respecting user's preferences.
I'm quite new to the Wikipedia project as contributor.
I tried to read Wiki's FAQs about multi-language coordination,
but found there only trivial instructions.
May be, some techinque already exist I'm not aware of,
but the proposed scheme has the following advantages:
* Fallback creator will not be forced to choose the *future* name
of the missing article in current language
( comparing to leaving a link to unborn article );
* User has not to load texts in foreign languages,
which he may be unable to display or to understand,
or which may be excessive if article in current language exist
( comparing to making foreign links [[:lang:term]] );
* User will be prompted, but not obliged,
to start the missing article, probably using existing foreign analogs,
and already equipped with interwiki links.
* Fallback creator should select, among article versions in many languages,
a "default" fallback language for a link,
possible based on its proximity to current language,
spread in current-language-speaking countries,
content quality and relevance, or some weighted sum of these factors.
Regards,
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