On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 01:58:51AM +0200, Timwi wrote:
Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
Timwi wrote:
- A global table for bidirectional inter-wiki links. People should not
have to add the same link to so many articles. In fact, taking this a step further, people should not even have to enter text like '[[fr:démocratie]]' into the article text when it's not part of the article text. There should be drop-downs underneath the big textbox listing languages, and little text boxes next to them for the target article name.
While it seems to be a very good thing, in fact it can't really work so because the relation between articles between the wikis is not a one-to-one relation For example on en:, the roman god and the greek ones share the same article but on fr: this is not the case, they have they own article. How a global table can resolve this sort of problems?
If the French Wikipedia has separate articles for them, it probably means several articles are warranted, in which case the English ones should be split to match. If not, the French ones should be combined. Or is there a good reason why French *needs* them separate when English doesn't?
If you have an answer to that, then use redirection pages. As I see it, French has two articles [[fr:Zeus]] and [[fr:Jupiter (mythologie)]], while English has [[en:Zeus]] and lets [[en:Jupiter (god)]] redirect to that. What's wrong with linking [[fr:Zeus]] <=> [[en:Zeus]] and [[fr:Jupiter (mythologie)]] <=> [[en:Jupiter (god)]]?
There's no reason why one language's Wikipedia should do something one way just because some other language's does it so. Forcing 1:1 correspondence because it's easier to code with it, and generally dictating policy based on purely technical reasons, is very rarely a good idea.
I think we should allow named multiple links and just do it automatically.
Markup: fr "Zeus" says [[en:Zeus]] fr "Jupiter (mythologie)" says [[en:Zeus]] pl "Zeus" [[en:Zeus]]
Links on en (if nothing is specified for French and Polish): [[fr:Zeus|French (Zeus)]], [[fr:Jupiter (mythologie)|French (Jupiter (mythologie))]], [[pl:Zeus|Polish]]
If we have relation more complex than 1:N we will link too much. For imaginary example: Polish: [[Historia - lata 1918-1939]], [[Historia - lata 1939-1945]]
English: [[History - years 1918-1941]], [[History - years 1941-1945]]
[[Historia - lata 1918-1939]] links to [[History - years 1918-1941]] [[Historia - lata 1939-1945]] links to both English articles [[History - years 1918-1941]] links to both Polish articles [[History - years 1941-1945]] links to [[Historia - lata 1939-1945]]