[WikiEN-l] Interwiki links for the Icelandic decade articles.

[Rowan Collins]

On Mon, 22 Nov, Ævar Arnfjörð wrote:
> [...] our decades and centuries
> are "off" by one year from "conventional" systems, we therefore cannot
> link to them since the two articles would not describe the same
> period.

Far be it from me to comment on a policy of the Icelandic Wikipedia,
but wouldn't it make more sense just to link to the nearly-equivalent
articles *anyway*, especially for the Centuries? I mean, if the
article at the [[en:...]] link for [[is:20. öldin]] contains
information about 1900, and none about 2000, but has the other 99
years in common, is that not better than no link at all?

Like I say, apologies if this is something that has been discussed to
death on the Icelandic wiki, but as a general principle, I think we
are always going to have imperfect matches like this in the
'translation' system - articles which contain stubs for multiple
topics, or just differences in what is deemed part of the "same
topic". Indeed, the very nature of translation will lead to these:
apparently, if I understood correctly, the English "penguin" has two
translations in French, so an article in English titled "penguin" will
never have a French link that is 100% equivalent. By leaving out such
links completely, we lose the integration that the interwiki links are
there to provide.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]