edward molasses wrote:
Hello everyone,
I had a question about how links to other languages are structured.
For example, when i am looking at an english word, and click on an entry in the left-hand column to see the definition in another language, sometimes there is an intermediate page on the other language's site that uses the english translation of the word as the page name and it lists a link to the translated word. I don't understand why sometimes this page organization is used?
An example is the intermediate page for the italian translation of the word house which can be found here: http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/house
Any help would be much appreciated, thank you, Andrew.
Hoi, When a word like house is created in the Italian wiktionary, it is a foreign word. Much of the information is with the Italian word, casa is this case. The way the interwiki links for wiktionary work is that they refer to words that are exactly spelled the same way. You may find different content for a word that is spelled the same way. The reason for this is that it is a lot of work when you have to add all the content on all words. So the information is there, it is just one click further away.
There have been two big changes in the interwiki world. The first is that the English language wiktionary now has its articles spelled in their default format; not more first character capitalisation. Many of the interwiki links have been changed that way to reflect this. The only problem left is that the interwiki software does not handle redirects well. When it refers to a redirect it will expect that this redirect is correct. In fact if the word is not in the same case, it propably is not.
The other big change has been in the interwiki.py program. It now allows you to run the bot and it will check a large number of wiktionaries that you can be simultaneously logged on. This means that when a new link is found for a word, it will be added to all words that the software is aware of. As you may understand, changes like this take their time to mature, however it is a mark of the maturity of the software that so many cool things are developped to such a degree of perfection.
Thanks, GerardM