[WikiEN-l] Serious problems with interlanguage links

[Ian Woollard]

2008/12/15 Carl Beckhorn <cbeckhorn at fastmail.fm>:
> On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 12:16:47AM +0000, Ian Woollard wrote:
>> Now straight away we are in trouble. The English wikipedia's Rocket
>> article is about the general case of rockets- any vehicle that is
>> propelled by a rocket engine, including a rather awesome Russian
>> torpedo, some drag racers, aircraft, and the worlds fastest train
>> (Mach 8.5!!!), whereas the French article is about only space rockets.
>
> Indeed - so the enwiki article should not link to the french one, since they
> are not about the same topic.

Gee, there was I think this UI feature was something intended to be
useful for the users. How naive was I?

>> But there's nowhere else to go. And this feature is working exactly as intended.
>
> Could you explain what you mean by "intended"? I have long thought that the
> intention of ill links is for articles that cover exactly the same subject.

Actually the articles in the wikipedia are on whatever the definition
in the lead says. So, your argument is that if the definitions in the
articles are *exactly* the same (even though they are written in
different languages) then they can be linked otherwise not? And I
presume you have teams of bilingual lawyers standing by to check this
for each and every link in the wikipedia?

I think, in that case you might as well delete all the links, the
chances of the definition being exactly the same in any two cases must
be so near to zero as to be not worth worrying about.

>> The problems are many fold. Linked articles can have a definition that
>> makes them a subset, partial overlap or superset.
>
> In each of those cases, it seems to me that no interlanguage link is
> appropriate.

It seems to me that the users of the wikipedia might prefer synonymous
links over no links at all. It also seems to me that the users of the
wikipedia are the ones creating the links not you, and somehow I doubt
that they are that worried about it. The links are for them, not the
bots.

>> There is absolutely no reason to think that these links are
>> transitive in practice or theory.
>
> In theory, there is plenty reason for the links to be transitive. Since that
> is the best way to automatically extend the links to other wikis via ill bots.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in
practice there is.

And "ill bots". Freudian.

I hope these bots are marking the links they're making so they can be
removed if necessary. The number of problems that bots/users can cause
if they are working at cross purposes, which they clearly are here,
must be almost astronomical.

> - Carl

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.