"Timwi" <timwi(a)gmx.net> schreef in bericht
news:d7sci3$g1q$1@sea.gmane.org...
Elly Waterman wrote:
Actually I think the system of interwiki links is
not optimal at all.
It would be better, to have a central location were all the
interwiki's are listed, like commons. [...]
Timwi wrote:
I think your proposal is mostly working from the assumption that there
exists a one-to-one mapping between the articles of one Wikipedia and all
the articles of all the other Wikipedias. Unfortunately, some Wikipedias
are a bit pig-headed and almost deliberately ensure that this assumption
can never hold. For example, the German Wikipedia seems to have a rule
that forbids it to ever have an article like [[Vulcan (Star Trek)]].
Instead, the interwiki link on the English article links to a German
article about all Star Trek races which is very much less detailed.
Obviously, there can never be a link back to the English article.
This is exactly the cause of some of the current almost unsolvable errors,
which keep running about. The English article on the Vulcan race should, in
my opinion, not link to a general German article on all Starktrek races. A
more general English article about all Startrek races, however, should (if
it exists). If there is no lookalike article in another language, you just
should not link to it. I think these problems will also be diminished by a
central database, at least they get more clearly visible.
But the one-to-one relation luckily holds for a lot of articles, years,
dates, people, simple objects, countries, small and big cities, mountains,
units, physical theories, chemical subtances, you name it. And for these
myself and many others are interested in more information other languages
may provide. We wikipedians are not so strange to each other as the Star
trek races ;-) , we have a very large common knowledge base.