For some reason, i'm not getting any mail from commons-l. I just found
this reply to my proposal (Why not treat every page as a category?) in
the archive and would like to answer it in the hope that the list will
work now. (full quote, because this mail also goes to wikitech-l, as it
is a request for a software feature)
Delphine (notafish) wrote:
OK, I think I get the idea now.
However, it still leaves open the discussion of multilingualism. If we
want to allow for every language to put in their categories, or do a
redirect, display will still be in whatever language has been
considered default, and not of any use to non-default language
speakers.
On another note, while this may work for images, the display of other
media files will be rendered very complicated if those files are not
self-comprehensive, ie. if they're not named accoding to their
content, in a language everybody understands.
How do you plan to address that ?
Multi-Language-Support was not on my mind when I wrote that proposal.
But thinking about it, I belive by adding a few more feature we would be
able to cope with this, too. As I already wrote on [1], i would suggest
the following:
1) It was much discussed that it would be good to show the link-title
which is placed after the "|" in the category link in the category
listing/as the thumbnail label, in order to have meaningful names in
categories, especially for images. Also, as of 1.4 people can choose
their preferred interface languag. We could combine those two features
with the concept of named parameters [[...|foo=bar|...]] as used with
templates:
Allow a category-link to look like this:
[[category:something|Something|de=Irgendwas|jp=....]]
giving a default label and labels for specific languages. Then, when
building the category listing, use the label corresponding to the users
interface language, if it is given. If not, use the default label. The
label should be used for sorting, and should be shown as the link
text/thumbnail label respectively.
2) Maybe one could even use the same concept to implement localized
image labels: [[Image:Foobar.png|The Foo bar|de=Der Fuh-Balken|jp=...]]
- that should not be too hard.
3) The one think still missing would be localizing the name of the
page/category. Maybe an #ALIAS [[category:xyz]] directive could be added
for categories (or the categorisation-aspect of pages, as by my original
proposal): If #ALIAS [[Foo]] is placed in category/article Bar, plages
and images added to cat Foo and to cat Bar would end up in the same
"pool". The Pages for Foo and Bar would have different textual content
and titles, but would list the exact same articles, images and
subcategories. Subcategories would need some more thought, though,
because in the german cat I want to have the german names of the
subcategories, etc.
Dolphin already said on [1] there that he likes my first idea. what do
you think?
And especially to the developers - how hard would it be to do that?
d.
[1]:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:VP#More_on_categories
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