[Commons-l] an idea for a commons help tool

[Brianna Laugher]

Since there are some really good tools being written lately, I thought
I'd throw up a request for one. :) This one would be quite easy to
make, I think. Just saves some typing. (I would like it for en.wp but
I think it would be pretty easy to make for any language.wp.)

Articles on Commons frequently have no contextual information - just a
heading and images. Sometimes this is OK but usually short description
blurbs and interwiki links would be better. The easiest way to make
these is to find the en.wp article, copy the list of interwiki links,
add the English interwiki link, then convert these to description tags
and either leave just the article name as the description, or add the
first sentence from the article.

e.g. today I fixed up this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur%27s_Seat&oldid=1728248

The description tags look like this:

{{en|This is where the first line of the article would go.}}

not a far leap from [[en:article name]] at all, really. You can also
link to the WP article in the description tag, or bold the subject, or
do neither.

Typically I only put the full description for English because I'm
usually fixing up other people's articles, then I just put the article
name for the other interwiki links _if it differs to the English
name_. For example with species, quite a few wikis put them at the
Latin binomial name (as does Commons), so I don't think it's necessary
to list 50 "translations" of a word that already appears on the page.

as an example see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Malamute ,
where I have only translated the labels that are not 'Alaskan
Malamute' (in this case they are different scripts).

Anyway does what I've described make sense? Basically I'd like to put
in the name of the relevant en.wp article, and get out the description
tags and interwiki links that I can paste right into my Commons
article.

Not at all urgent, of course...

cheers,
Brianna


--
"Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."