For several months now, I have been busy with the interwiki links, using Rob Hoofts bot. The more I am working with it, the more work there has to be done, it seems. Others are also working hard on it. Actually I think the system of interwiki links is not optimal at all. It would be better, to have a central location were all the interwiki's are listed, like commons. The big advantage would be there is only one location where you have to put you interwikis, and were you can correct the errors. The number of edits would be reduced enormously. Maybe it could even be combined with the existing commons. The system could start by making a dump of all interwiki's from English wikipedia, which I think has the most interwiki's.
For instance for the article Bablefish:
- On the central location, there is a page Bablefish which lists all interwikis only. Maybe it needs one or two sentences for explanation, if required to explain the exact meaning. - On your local language wikipedia you have to link only to this page Bablefish. Automatically the links appears at the side of the article, the same way as we are used to now.
Of course there will be difficulties to solve, like which languages to be used. Will it be allowed to rename those pages (please don't). Maybe these both problems might be solved by redirects. I personally wouldn't care if the main language is English. Surely, these pages are only a technical means to streamline of the enormous amount of interwiki's. Has anyone ever estimated them? And how much effort all the editing costs? The name of these pages could be a number as well, but that is not how people like to work.
Maybe this has been suggested before, in that case, my apologies.
Elly Waterman
Elly Waterman wrote:
Actually I think the system of interwiki links is not optimal at all. It would be better, to have a central location were all the interwiki's are listed, like commons. [...]
I think your proposal is mostly working from the assumption that there exists a one-to-one mapping between the articles of one Wikipedia and all the articles of all the other Wikipedias. Unfortunately, some Wikipedias are a bit pig-headed and almost deliberately ensure that this assumption can never hold. For example, the German Wikipedia seems to have a rule that forbids it to ever have an article like [[Vulcan (Star Trek)]]. Instead, the interwiki link on the English article links to a German article about all Star Trek races which is very much less detailed. Obviously, there can never be a link back to the English article.
Ideally, maybe all Wikipedians should decide independently of language what articles should or should not exist, and then write those articles in all languages. Unfortunately, this idea is doomed because some Wikipedians have a very strong "localist attitude" -- any idea that would combine decision-making across several Wikipedias would be passed off and rejected as "rule from en". Supposedly, Wikipedians who do not speak language X are not supposed to have any say whatsoever on what happens on the language-X Wikipedia.
Timwi
"Timwi" timwi@gmx.net schreef in bericht news:d7sci3$g1q$1@sea.gmane.org...
Elly Waterman wrote:
Actually I think the system of interwiki links is not optimal at all. It would be better, to have a central location were all the interwiki's are listed, like commons. [...]
Timwi wrote: I think your proposal is mostly working from the assumption that there exists a one-to-one mapping between the articles of one Wikipedia and all the articles of all the other Wikipedias. Unfortunately, some Wikipedias are a bit pig-headed and almost deliberately ensure that this assumption can never hold. For example, the German Wikipedia seems to have a rule that forbids it to ever have an article like [[Vulcan (Star Trek)]]. Instead, the interwiki link on the English article links to a German article about all Star Trek races which is very much less detailed. Obviously, there can never be a link back to the English article.
This is exactly the cause of some of the current almost unsolvable errors, which keep running about. The English article on the Vulcan race should, in my opinion, not link to a general German article on all Starktrek races. A more general English article about all Startrek races, however, should (if it exists). If there is no lookalike article in another language, you just should not link to it. I think these problems will also be diminished by a central database, at least they get more clearly visible.
But the one-to-one relation luckily holds for a lot of articles, years, dates, people, simple objects, countries, small and big cities, mountains, units, physical theories, chemical subtances, you name it. And for these myself and many others are interested in more information other languages may provide. We wikipedians are not so strange to each other as the Star trek races ;-) , we have a very large common knowledge base.
Elly Waterman wrote:
If there is no lookalike article in another language, you just should not link to it. I think these problems will also be diminished by a central database, at least they get more clearly visible.
That's your POV. Other people disagree. If you are going to implement some technical solution to a problem, you can't just say "if everyone follows _my_ opinion, the problem is solved".
Timwi wrote:
Elly Waterman wrote:
If there is no lookalike article in another language, you just should not link to it. I think these problems will also be diminished by a central database, at least they get more clearly visible.
That's your POV. Other people disagree. If you are going to implement some technical solution to a problem, you can't just say "if everyone follows _my_ opinion, the problem is solved".
Hoi, When a solution is proposed, it has its own inherent rules/restrictuons, calling this POV is a bit off. A solution like this is either adopted or rejected. It has to be seen for what it is; a solution to a problem. When it improves on the current practices, it is a way forward. Not accepting is because some people have different views is stupid. Let those people voice their arguments. Now your argument is not much more than "it has nothing to do with me". If you do not have an opinion, do not voice one.
Thanks, GerardM
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Timwi wrote:
Elly Waterman wrote:
If there is no lookalike article in another language, you just should not link to it. I think these problems will also be diminished by a central database, at least they get more clearly visible.
That's your POV. Other people disagree. If you are going to implement some technical solution to a problem, you can't just say "if everyone follows _my_ opinion, the problem is solved".
When a solution is proposed, it has its own inherent rules/restrictions, calling this POV is a bit off.
That is not what I called POV. Elly said (above): "If there is no lookalike article in another language, you just should not link to it." That is her opinion, and it doesn't happen to agree with mine. My opinion is that "If there is lookalike content, even if it is part of an article on a more general topic that encompasses it, you _should_ link to it."
Therefore, if you make it impossible for me to make that link, I will not be likely to call that a "way forward", nor will I think of it as a "solution" to the problem.
When it improves on the current practices, it is a way forward.
But if it improves on the current practices only in the opinion of some people but not others, then it is a way forward only in the opinion of some people but not others.
Timwi
On Sat, 2005-06-04 at 15:10 +0100, Timwi wrote:
Elly Waterman wrote:
Actually I think the system of interwiki links is not optimal at all. It would be better, to have a central location were all the interwiki's are listed, like commons. [...]
I think your proposal is mostly working from the assumption that there exists a one-to-one mapping between the articles of one Wikipedia and all the articles of all the other Wikipedias. Unfortunately, some Wikipedias are a bit pig-headed and almost deliberately ensure that this assumption can never hold. For example, the German Wikipedia seems to have a rule that forbids it to ever have an article like [[Vulcan (Star Trek)]]. Instead, the interwiki link on the English article links to a German article about all Star Trek races which is very much less detailed. Obviously, there can never be a link back to the English article.
Well, I think a proposal like this could still reduce duplication significantly, and would work fine even in the above scenario. (Note: I haven't looked up the real article names; I'm making up article names for the following.) For instance, you could have [[en:Vulcan]] (and [[ja:Vulcan]], and [[fr:Vulcan]], etc.) refer to [[interwiki:Vulcan]]; [[interwiki:Vulcan]] would refer to [[en:Vulcan]], [[ja:Vulcan]], [[fr:Vulcan]], and [[de:Star Trek Races]]. The German article [[de:Star Trek Races]] would refer to [[interwiki:Star Trek Races]], which would refer to [[en:Star Trek]], [[ja:Star Trek]], [[fr:Star Trek]], and [[de:Star Trek Races]]. This cuts the number of lists-of-interwiki-links to maintain from 4 to 2. (I don't know if it actually reduces the amount of work involved in maintaining interwiki links, because I don't know how sophisticated the bots are.)
Carl Witty
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carl Witty" cwitty@newtonlabs.com Newsgroups: gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2005 10:43 PM Subject: Re: Re: possible interwiki solution
Well, I think a proposal like this could still reduce duplication significantly, and would work fine even in the above scenario. (Note: I haven't looked up the real article names; I'm making up article names for the following.) For instance, you could have [[en:Vulcan]] (and [[ja:Vulcan]], and [[fr:Vulcan]], etc.) refer to [[interwiki:Vulcan]]; [[interwiki:Vulcan]] would refer to [[en:Vulcan]], [[ja:Vulcan]], [[fr:Vulcan]], and [[de:Star Trek Races]]. The German article [[de:Star Trek Races]] would refer to [[interwiki:Star Trek Races]], which would refer to [[en:Star Trek]], [[ja:Star Trek]], [[fr:Star Trek]], and [[de:Star Trek Races]]. This cuts the number of lists-of-interwiki-links to maintain from 4 to 2. (I don't know if it actually reduces the amount of work involved in maintaining interwiki links, because I don't know how sophisticated the bots are.)
Carl Witty
In general the reduction of duplicition will be much larger. Say an certain article exists on 21 languages. Then on each of these languanges there will eventually be 20 interwiki links to the other articles. In total 21x20 = 420 links. If the title of one of these changes, it needs 20 edits on the 20 other languages.
In this proposal, if you have one central location with all interwiki links, you only have to change 1 link. This means a reduction of editting effort from 20 edits to only 1. You only have 21 links in the central database, versus 420 links in the current system.
And in the future, possibly not so far away with our current growth of languages and articles, the reduction (in case of 100 languages) will be 100 to 1. This is an enormous reduction of editing load, searching for articles in the database, involvement of people and bots, who can do other useful things.
Elly
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