[WikiEN-l] Serious problems with interlanguage links

[Delirium]

Carl Beckhorn wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 12:16:47AM +0000, Ian Woollard wrote:
>   
>> Well, let's take an example, like:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket
>>
>> Down the side are a huge number of links including the French one:
>>
>> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fus%C3%A9e_spatiale
>>
>> This title translates as 'Space Rocket'.
>>
>> 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.
>   

As a human user of interwiki links, I don't necessarily use them as a 
way of saying "here is an article on the same topic", but "here is an 
article that also covers this topic". I do agree with you in this 
particular case---maybe I'm wrong on this, but I don't generally expect 
links to *narrower* topics. But links to *wider* topics are fine, if the 
linked article does cover the specific topic.

So if, for example, en chose to cover some subjects A1 and A2 as part of 
one big unified article on A, but fr chose to make two different 
articles, A1 and A2, then I would expect both fr:A1 and fr:A2 to 
interwiki link to en:A (the English article where the equivalent content 
can be found), but no en: interwiki links to fr:, since there's no 
article with equivalent content. Actually I might link en:A to link to 
*both* fr:A1 and fr:A2, to indicate to me that the equivalent content 
can be found spread across those two articles, but I'm not sure you can 
link to multiple pages of the same language in one page.

I realize this is problematic for automatic linking, but automatic 
linking really is problematic unless we were to keep our editions much 
more in sync than we actually do. It's not just shifts in meaning as you 
translate between languages that are a problem, but different editorial 
decisions made in organizing articles, that would result in many 
articles just having no interwiki links at all, if we were to insist on 
only on exact equivalents as links. This is especially true of 
conceptual subjects, as opposed to proper nouns, which do tend to be 
more directly equivalent---so for example, there is more gray area and 
lack of transitivity when linking articles about law in general, than 
when linking articles about specific legislative acts or court cases.

-Mark