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

Tue Jun 26 12:50:20 UTC 2012

Amir,

thank you for the thoughtful reply!

Indeed our current plan is a kind of a staged deployment in the sense
that we will not automatically transfer the links but let the editor
community do it. On our test systems we already see bots being tried
out and rewritten, so we expect that as soon as Wikidata starts, we
will see that transition happening.

But the current language link system will continue to work, so no
article or Wikipedia is forced to switch to the Wikidata system.
Complex language links configurations can still be handled manually --
and maybe even easier so, since conflicts between bots and human
editors should be less likely to happen.

I hope that this is the right path to "profit" :)

Cheers,
Denny

2012/6/25 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il>:
> 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
>> Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
>> Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de
>>
>> Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
>> Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
>> unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
>> Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
>>
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-- 
Project director Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.