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

[Deryck Chan]

One major problem with double language links I've encountered before was
that they confuse interwiki bots and therefore break things. Several
articles on the Cantonese Wikipedia (zh-yue.wp) pertaining to local
political and cultural issues in the Cantonese-speaking world have
__NOBOT__ on them simply because they have topic splits that are
significantly different from other Wikipedias, and bot interwiki
manipulation need to be prevented to maintain topic correspondence between
languages.

In short: double language links are a possible idea, but only if we can
upgrade the interwiki bots first.

On 25 June 2012 11:29, Denny Vrandečić <denny.vrandecic at wikimedia.de> wrote:

> 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
>
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