Hi everyone,
as a multilingual user of Wikipedia, I am always looking for new ways of using and accessing the content from different language wikis. I am Norwegian, but I read Chinese and I have several friends who often edit there. Whoever, if I want to look up an article in Chinese Wikipedia, it's a hassle since I don't necessarily know how they write "Oslo" or "Plato" in Chinese... so I did this little tool
http://70.47.70.10/redir/en/zh/Oslo
it will automatically git you the page in Chinese Wikipedia that is interlinked from the article about Oslo in the English Wikipedia. (This works for all language combinations - given that there are interwiki links - and all articles. Use _ instead of spaces).
http://70.47.70.10/redir/no/ar/Demokrati
it only downloads the first article, does a quick regexp, and forwards to the second article. I have posted about this on the Norwegian and Indonesian community pages. Not sure what is the place to list this tool on the English wiki / Mediawiki?
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Another thing that has struck me is that being able to read several languages, I often don't really mind that much which wiki a certain article comes from - but I would like to read the longest or most complete article on a given topic. However in practice I find myself often "constrained" to the English wikipedia because that is generally the best, or the Indonesian if I am reading on Indonesian topics etc.
so this url
http://70.47.70.10/bigger/en/no,sv,id,ms/Poland
will automatically redirect you to whatever of the articles in no, sv, id or ms that is _longer_ (pure bytesize, not very scientific but still) of the articles linkes from the English Poland page.
This is insanely useful (it's mainly meant to be a Firefox bookmark - plug in the languages you are comfortable reading in, call it big, and whenever you want an article type big Television, and you will get the longest article in one of the languages you know).
However - right now what it's doing is downloading a full page from each of the Wikipedias, to find the size. So in the above example, it would download five full pages, before redirecting the user to one of them (causing it to be downloaded again)... I'm obviously not happy about wasting Wikipedia bandwidth, so I wonder if there is a better way of doing this - getting just the size of any given page... I will not post this online anywhere else, until I have some guidance from this list.
Both are written in respectively 20 and 43 lines of Ruby CGI code btw. I can post the code if anyone wants it.
Stian