On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
So, my question:
Has anybody mapped exactly how many such interwiki conflicts we
have? Or how many interwiki sets do we have without conflicts?
Could/should someone make a list of current conflicts and try to
rank them by importance, so we can get started in fixing them?
As you already noted, pywikipediabot when run autonomously will add a
remark on each such conflict, so that would be an easy way to harvest
a large number of them. There are many of them - although there are
many people working on interwiki, they usually either just add them,
or run autonomous bots, correcting incorrect links takes place much
less.
Resolving them is in some cases easy, but in many cases not. Different
Wikipedias not rarely have different ways of 'subdividing' the
'universe' of possible meanings. This means that the dual assumptions
that 'interwiki is an equivalence relation' and 'any page can
interwiki to only one page in a single language' that the framework is
based on, are often not met, or only in artificial ways.
Examples of problems are:
* Closely connected subjects (for example, a biological order and the
only family in it, a municipality and its main town by the same name,
a fruit tree and its fruit, a computer game and the series of which it
is the first game, two scientific terms which are each other's
opposite) have two pages on some Wikipedias, one page on other, and
that one page is sometimes more one subject, sometimes more the other,
and sometimes really about both
* Words that mean a general term in one language being used for a more
specific one in another language, for example [[en:Autobahn]] being
about highways in Germany, [[de:Autobahn]] about highways in general,
or the name of a Japanese traditional dagger being used to mean that
specific type of dagger in western language, but more generally
'dagger' in Japanese, or countries using their own mythical small
creature as the best translation of 'dwarf', but being about dwarves
in a specific mythology elsewhere
* Slight shifts of meaning from one language to the other causing a
sequence of 'closest connections' leading to another word in the same
language
--
André Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com