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

Sounds kinda useful ... do we have a special page that does this? Should we? e.g. [[Special:Interwiki/ar/Demokrati]] on :no could return an HTTP redirect to http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%85%D9%82%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%B7%D9%8... If so, it should be filed in bugzilla ( http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki )

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?

Rather than downloading and doing a regexp, maybe have a quick look at the MediaWiki API. Example for the Poland page, this essentially gives just the interwiki links: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=langlinks&titles...

Docs on API: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

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 links 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).

Nice! Worth considering for inclusion in-core? (If so, a bug report should be filed, same as per the above).

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.

You could maybe try using the HTTP HEAD command, which will give you a quick header, including the length of the page in bytes, without having to retrieve it all.

E.g. if you have the cURL command line program, you could try the commands below, and the Content Length returned is shown after the "-->".

curl --head 'http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Polen&action=raw' --> 68319 bytes curl --head 'http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Polen&action=raw' --> 35746 bytes curl --head 'http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Polandia&action=raw' --> 6576 bytes curl --head 'http://ms.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Poland&action=raw' --> 10546 bytes

(Note: I couldn't see anything in the API that gave the article size when searching in the docs for "size", "byte", or "length", but it's arguable that maybe it could be included in the prop=info request - e.g. could maybe include the page length in bytes in this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=info&titles=Pola... )

-- All the best, Nick.

Hi Stian, If done on the toolserver, the interwikis could be checked directly on their db copy. Recently, revisions also provide page length, so "bigger" could be done on many pages without needing to fetch it.

Anyone with toolserver access feel like coding it?

Platonides