On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Sascha Noyes wrote:
3) Create a unified inter-language link field (similar
to what I have proposed
for pictures/images). This would have a list of languages in which a
particular article is available.
Pro: No need for robot traffic that eats up man-hours, bandwidth, cpu, ram,
disc usage. No massive waste of man-hours due to just continuing as we are.
Con: mediawiki development of such a feature.
Another obvious problem is that the field relating to each article will have
to have a unique identifier which is referrenced from each different language
version of that article. Two possible approaches:
a) just settle on the english title, I know this is language-ism and will piss
a bunch of people off
b) unique identifier is a number. The problem here is obvious: If you write a
new article you will 'have' to check that the article has not been written in
a different language already and therefore already has a unique number.
Actually, now that I think about it option (b) sounds pretty stupid.
Thoughts?
I think using English is not the best way to go. The reason is the existence
of homonyms and synonyms (or, in Wikipedia language, disambiguation pages
and redirects). My proposal would be to have the unique identifier be
something internal, that normal users do not see. Just like article id's are
now.
The idea is that the user specifies one page in some other Wikipedia that
your page should link to. The software then checks whether that other page
already has an 'international id'. If so, yours gets the same id, if not,
a new id is created for the two.
However, probably it is necessary to also give an option to specify that
certain pages, while members of the same id, are not linked to eachother.
nl: has a page "Adam" and a page "Eva" (Eve), en: has a single page
"Adam
and Eve". It is logical to link both nl:Adam and nl:Eva to en:Adam_and_Eve,
and en:Adam_and_Eve could be linked to either or both Dutch pages, but I
would not want nl:Adam to link to nl:Eva (or to Eve in any other language
that has the two split). Whether in such a case it would be better to have
one id ("Adam and Eve", with extra specification that some links do not
exist), two ids ("Adam" and "Eve", with some pages having two ids) or
three
ids ("Adam", "Eve", "Adam and Eve", with additional
information that the first
two link to the latter and the latter to the first two, but the first two
not to each other), I do not know yet, but I somewhat lean towards the last
solution.
I also want to say that already in March or so there was a system being
implemented as a demo on the test.wiki - who made that and how much needs
still be done?
Andre Engels