Lars Aronsson hett schreven:
What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing?
Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself? If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned something useful from another one?
As you are speaking of infoboxes and crosswiki, I want to chip in another thought: why do we actually place infobox templates on every single wiki? In 2007 I created some semiautomatic bot articles about municipalities on my home wiki. In 2008 they had elections and elected new mayors. So my articles mentioning the mayors were outdated. The articles in the main language of that country were updated relatively quickly, Mine are not yet. I plan to do, but who does that for all articles in all language editions?
An example: Bavaria held communal elections in March 2008. Enough time to update infoboxes. The municipality Adelzhausen got Lorenz Braun as new mayor, replacing Thomas Goldstein. I checked all interwikis of the German article. Two had it right. Both were created after the elections. Four don't mention the mayor at all, and six still mentioned the old mayor. No wiki had bothered to update the information.
It would be much easier, if we had a central repository for the data. We would place infoboxes in the central wiki. Each wiki then could fetch the data from the central wiki just as images are fetched from Commons and render the data into a localised infobox. That would be much more accurate than maintaining redundant info on potentially hundreds of wikis.
Marcus Buck
PS: And that would be interesting in regard to "botopedias" too. Volapük Wikipedia was massively critized for creating masses of bot content. With a central wiki for data creating articles for example for all the ~37,000 municipalities of France would essentially be reduced to creating a template that renders the central content into an article. Little Wikipedias could greatly benefit, if they just had to create some templates to make available info on hundreds of thousands of topics to the speakers of their language. It would be very basic, infobox-like information, but it would be information.