Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 01:58:51AM +0200, Timwi wrote:
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.
Why? The only reason Wikipedia exists in several languages is to make it accessible to speakers of other languages, not to create different content based on a certain audience. Ideally, the actual contents of the Wikipedias should be the same, only in different languages. In particular, the set of covered topics (read: article titles) should be the same, because the set of expressible topics as well as the importance or relevance of each topic do *not* depend on language.
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.
As outlined in the above paragraph, my reasoning is not solely based on coding and technical reasons. My greatest concern is consistency, conformance to user expectation, and minimising user confusion.
Let's take a real-life example. I'm German, now suppose my English were rather poor. I read some website which has a link to an English Wikipedia article. I see the "Other languages:" list of links at the top; I want it to go straight to the German version of what I'm seeing, or what the original website intended to link to. I should not have to make an extra decision (which of the several German links to follow), nor should I have to worry that an article I go to will contain stuff I'm not expecting to see, i.e. stuff the original website didn't intend to link to.
Another example. Suppose I was bilingual and I liked to compare German and English versions of articles for fun (or for some project or whatever). So I read through a German article first. Then I click on the link to the English article. I would expect there to be a link straight back to the German article I had just read; if there were two links to two German articles, I'd be confused, and I'd be unable to compare any two articles not only because they are contentually not the same, but because none of the three are even about the exact same topic.
Links on en (if nothing is specified for French and Polish): [[fr:Zeus|French (Zeus)]], [[fr:Jupiter (mythologie)|French (Jupiter (mythologie))]], [[pl:Zeus|Polish]]
As I said above, I really don't think it's a good idea to load an unnecessary decision upon the user (which article to go to), especially when the links are somewhere in the middle of a long list of links to all sorts of other languages.
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]]
As you said yourself, that's linking too much. It would confuse users a lot. I think in this case [[en:1918-1941]] should clearly link to [[pl:1918-1939]] because that covers most of it. Then [[pl:1918-1939]] in turn should have navigational links to what comes before 1918 and what comes after 1939.
However, as you also said yourself, this was a fictional example. From the impression I got, we're supposed to have one page for each single year, one for each decade, one for each century, etc. I can see where using arbitrary periods of time could lead to a heated POV debate because people will think the boundaries are chosen with reference to events that are the most important only to a subset of the audience.
Again, the contents of the Wikipedias should be the same. They should only be in different languages.
Timwi