[Wikimedia-l] Language links and double language links on the Wikipedias

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Hi Denny,

TL;DR: It's a very important question, but don't worry about it too
much. Just do Wikidata well as it is currently planned.

Now, the full reply.

I wrote a bit of an essay about it in 2008:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tips_for_resolving_interwiki_conflicts

I also started a page to coordinate the efforts to resolve such conflicts:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_synchronization

It started out nicely, but didn't really scale, so I had no choice but
to neglect it.

There are two main reasons that it didn't scale:
1. Fixing interlanguage links conflicts is an exhausting manual
process. The Interlanguage extension or Wikidata are supposed to make
it centralized and easier.

2. Almost all Wikipedians are very, very reluctant about doing
anything outside their home projects.

So, Wikidata is supposed to resolve #1. Once it becomes active, #2
will kick in again. At this stage, all I can say is our old motto: "Be
Bold". There's a rumor about me, which says that I know a lot of
languages. I don't; I'm just bold about trying to edit Wikipedias in
languages that I don't know. Everybody can do it. Most of the time it
turns out to be correct and people don't complain. Trying to talk to
people about this on village pumps and using global message delivery
is not very efficient. In many languages, even in some major ones, the
village pumps are not as active as in English, and even when they are,
people very often ignore messages in English.

Anyway, my proposal is this:
* As discussed at bug 15607 [1], the best strategy for rolling out
centralized language links is to enable them in articles without
conflicts and to leave articles with conflicts without any change at
first.
* After initial roll-out, a list of conflicts for every project should
be created. That is, there should be one list of articles with
conflicts in the English Wikipedia, another list for the Hebrew
Wikipedia, another one for Croatian, etc. This will make it relatively
more accessible for people, because it will look like a problem in
their project. Most people like solving local problems more than
global problems.[2]
* Profit.

I believe that this crowdsourcing model may work. It won't be
immediately perfect or very fast. It's just a sensible start.

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15607

[2] A technical implementation comment about the "list of pages with
conflicts": it will be most efficient, if it will be implemented as a
special page in each project. If updating it immediately is too
burdensome in terms of performance, it can be updated in batches every
week or so. The reason it should be a special page is that it will
look like an integrated site feature and that it will be easy to
localize its interface.

2012/6/25 Denny Vrandečić <denny.vrandecic at wikimedia.de>:
> Hi all,
>
> I ran some analysis last week, to get some numbers out of the
> Wikipedia language links. One type of reports that were generated was
> the list of all articles in the main namespaces of the Wikipedias that
> link to more than one article in another language edition of Wikipedia
> (so called double language links). There are not that many of them
> (about 19,000 in total), split by language, all available here:
>
> <http://simia.net/languagelinks/>
>
> Double language links are not errors per se, but they contain a few nuisances
> * they lead to two links in the language links list that just look the
> same (you have to hover over them to see that they link to different
> languages), which is not really optimal from the user experience side
> * they are not saved in the langlinks table and thus are ignored in
> certain reports and also in the respective export
>
> I am not sure how to reach out to the respective Wikipedia
> communities, or if I should at all. Should I post to their respective
> version of the village pump? Remembering from the time I was active on
> the Croatian Wikipedia, I would have appreciated that list to check
> the entries. I reckoned the wikipedia-l list would be the right place,
> but that list looks rather dead.
>
> Cheers,
> Denny
>
> --
> Project director Wikidata
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