[WikiEN-l] Category translation

[Andrew Gray]

On 06/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Looking a bit into this, I agree it'll be a hurdle.  How big of a
> > hurdle I still don't know.
>
> Just fwiw, one simple basic example I have dealt with.
>
> [[fr:Carnac]] discusses both the township of Carnac and the famous
> Carnac stones which are found within the town.
>
> I split [[en:Carnac]] into that article which only discusses the town,
> and [[en:Carnac stones]] which discusses the megalithic site.
>
> [[en:carnac]] and [[en:Carnac stones]] both interwikilink to
> [[fr:Carnac]]. However, nothing (anywhere) interwikilinks back to
> [[en:Carnac stones]]. There is no clean mechanism for doing so. The
> French article *could* link twice - once to each article - but then
> you'd just have two interwiki links labelled "English" and only the
> URL would tell you which was which.
>
> In other words, many -> one correspondances are ok. One -> many are
> unhandled atm. Occasionally you'll see "French Wikipedia article"
> given as a "further reading" link but I don't think the MoS sanctions
> that.

This is basically what I was talking about upthread, but Steve
explained the fundamental issue better than me... the scope of
articles in different languages isn't a 1:1 correspondence.

The problem with language and cultural issues isn't with neutrality,
or whether-or-not something gets written about, it's how it gets
written about. Indeed, the "cultures" aren't really differences
between Danish culture and Japanese culture - they're differences
between the internal culture of the Danish wikipedia and that of the
Japanese wikipedia.

In some projects, the use of broad-scope articles may be much more
popular than in others, so you have one article on X mapping to three
or four on Y. And different groups have different preferences as to
how to do these broad articles. In the case of [[Carnac stones]], it
could rationally be part of a broader article organised on a
geographic basis ([[Carnac]]), a thematic basis ([[Standing stones]]),
or a historic basis ([[Prehistoric monuments]]).

I honestly don't know if this is the case. But I'm betting that, to
some degree, it is... or it is enough to screw up any kind of
cross-project categorisation program.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk