[WikiEN-l] Serious problems with interlanguage links

[Lukasz Bolikowski]

Matthew Brown wrote:
> Since policy describes practice and not the other way round, I suspect
> that the policies may need fixing or clarifying.

Fixing or clarifying the policies is definitely one of the possible
options to solve the problem, although I suspect that it will not be
easy to reach a consensus in this case, for at least two reasons:

1) the engine was not designed with the proposed interpretation in mind
(at least in one point it is assumed that there is at most one ILL from
a page to a wiki);

2) my guess, partially based on the statistics that I've gathered, is
that over 95% of the ILLs are "exact", while the remaining 5% or less
are either "approximate" or plain wrong -- the vast majority of edits is
done in line with the current policies.

In the perfect world, we'd have both the "exact" and "approximate" ILLs,
with tags specifying which are which, and the coherence of the "exact"
ILLs would be guaranteed by the engine.

>> Also, I'd be nice if the community used the ILLs in more or less
>> consistent manner (which is apparently not the case right now).
> 
> By this do you mean the en.wp community, or the community of all
> projects in all languages?  If the latter case, I suspect consistency
> is not practically possible.

I meant the whole community.  Yes, it might be tough, but not
impossible.  If we had two types of ILLs ("exact" and "approximate"),
people would be forced to know their intended meanings, and hopefully
they'd respect them.

> This feels to me essentially the same issue as with the category tree:
> while some might prefer a strict IS-A relationship for categorization,
> in practice we have to accept that all that category membership means
> is some kind of hopefully human-understandable relationship.

That's a very sober observation.  I do try not to be a technocrat too,
apparently with mixed results.

Anyway, the discussion here has focused on whether the "approximate"
ILLs are OK or not, while the most funny/surprising results of my
analysis are not a result of the "appropriate" ILLs, but the plain wrong
ones.  And *these can be fixed without waiting for a new functionality
in the engine, or a consensus among the editors*!

Sticking with the example that I've given before: all the paths from the
plumbing-related topics to the vulture-related ones are leading through
three clearly incorrect links to:
  [[:es:Grifo]] (instead of [[:es:Llave de paso]])
from the Farsi, Italian and Swedish editions (I've already corrected all
the three links).  You can find thousands of clearly incorrect links by
analyzing the incoherent paths at http://wikitools.icm.edu.pl/

Regards,
Łukasz