[WikiEN-l] Serious problems with interlanguage links

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 9:22 AM, Eugene van der Pijll
<eugene at vanderpijll.nl> wrote:
> Lukasz Bolikowski schreef:
>> A short introduction: let's say that two articles are connected if there
>> is an interlanguage link from one to the other in at least one
>> direction.  Next, let's say that if A-B and B-C are connected, then A-C
>> are too.
>
> Hold it right there. That assumes that every wikipedia divides its
> content into pages in the same way. Since content policy is made at
> the level of individual projects, this assumption is incorrect.
>
>> With over 3'000'000 links to check,
>> it has to be corrected semi-automatically.
>
> It doesn't have to be corrected at all, since you've not actually
> demonstrated that it is incorrect now.

"en:December" to "en:City", or
"en:Alpine Ibex" to "en:Western culture"

Correct?   really?

I think he's demonstrated that there exist problems, but not yet
demonstrated that there exist many.  So long as we support
interlinking wikipedias of dramatically different size there will be
some drift because the larger projects will make finer subdivisions.

Lukasz analysis depends on linking being communicative, but this can
only be true when there is only one kind of link (x is the same
subject no more, no less as y).  If we limited ourselves to that it
would preclude the "x is covered by broader article y" link which is
absolutely necessary if we want to produce useful interwiki links from
bigger projects to smaller ones.

(And I'd argue that the interwiki links from big projects such as
en,es,fr,de to smaller projects like hi are important to getting
native speakers of these smaller projects to discover the existence of
those projects on the predominantly English speaking internet)

It would be interesting to re-run the analysis including only linkages
which among the largest few Wikipedia and resolve those first: Those
really should be much closer to the ideal "x==y" behavior.