[Wikimedia-l] A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia

[Jane Darnell]

Love it!

2013/8/7, Denny Vrandečić <denny.vrandecic at wikimedia.de>:
> 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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