Hi
I want to raise the issue that the inter-language link situation at the moment
is a big mess:
Please have a look at Rob Hooft's 5 pages listing articles on the english
wikipedia that do not have inter-language links to corresponding articles in
other languages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Rob_Hooft/page1 (1 through 5).
There are literally thousands of such links missing. Multiply this by roughly
two, to factor in the missing links on all the other languages (English
wikipedia has roughly half the total number of articles), and you can see the
magnitude of the problem.
The correct alphabetical ordering of links is also necessary, and adds more
work.
Now, there are a couple of solutions to this problem (please add your own):
1) Just continue as we have been doing. Additionally asking people to make an
effort to add inter-language links.
Pro: doesn't require any mediawiki changes
Con: wastes a _massive_ amount of man-hours that needless to say could be
better employed
2) Deploy the robot that Rob wrote (and is using on the Dutch wikipedia) on
all wikipedias. To my knowledge this robot searches for missing links and
automatically adds those.
Pro: no mediawiki changes necessary
Con: at least one person per language is needed to run/administer the robot
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?
Best,
Sascha Noyes
aka snoyes
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