[Wikimedia-l] A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

I have been thinking about this for a while, and now finally managed to
write it down as a proposal. Details are on meta on the following link,
below is the intro to the proposal:

<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia>

I tried to anticipate some possible questions and provide answers on the
page. Besides that, I obviously hope that Wikimania could provide a place
to start this conversation. And yes, I am aware that the proposal would
lead to a very restrictive solution, but imagine what good it already could
achieve! And since it is not meant to replace anything, but enrich our
current projects... well, read for yourself.

Cheers,
Denny


Wikipedia provides knowledge in more than 200 languages. Whereas a small
number of languages are fortunate enough to have a large Wikipedia, many of
the language editions are far away from providing a comprehensive
encyclopedia by any measure. There are several approaches towards closing
this gap, mostly focusing on increasing the number of contributors to the
small language editions or to improve the provision of automatic or
semi-automatic translations of articles. Both are viable. In the following
we present a proposal for a different approach, which is based on the idea
of multilingual Wikipedia.

Imagine a small extension to the template system, where a template call
like *{{F12}}* would not be expanded by a call to the template
Template:F12, but rather to Template:F12/en, i.e. the template name with
the selected language code of the reader of the page. A template call such
as *{{F12:Q64|Q5519|Q183}}* can be expanded by Template:F12/en into *“Berlin
is the capital of Germany.”* and by Template:F12/de into *“Berlin ist die
Hauptstadt Deutschlands.”* (in the example, the template parameters Q5119,
Q64 and Q183 refer to the Wikidata items for capital, Berlin and Germany
respectively, which the templates query for the label in the respective
language). Sentence by sentence could be created in order to provide for a
simple article.

That wiki would consist of *content*, i.e. the article pages, possibly just
a simple series of template calls, and *frames*, i.e. the templates that
lexicalize the parameters of a given template call into a sentence (Note
that “sentence” here should not be considered literally. It could be a
table, an image, anything). The implementation of the frames can be done in
normal wiki template syntax, in Lua, in a novel mechanism, or a mix of
these. This would be up to the communities creating them.

Read the rest here:
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia>

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