[Wikimedia-l] A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia

[Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada]

Most times the best approach is a compilation of several approaches.

Perhaps we can use the Denny system for the little introduction of articles
(for example: geography, biographies) and optional automatic translation
for the rest of the article.

I mean, if you follow a red link in a little Wikipedia, it loads the i18n
template + wikidata bits, so you have a brief summary about the topic. Then
you can save that "live" generated stub, and expand it (using
autotraslation from other WIkipedia).


2013/8/7 Anders Wennersten <mail at anderswennersten.se>

> Thanks for sharing your very interesting ideas. While I am not fully
> support your idea of implementation, I share your basic view of the need
> and think some of the concepts you introduce has a very high potential to
> better utilize the power of us having many versions.
>
> I have put in my feedback on the talkpage and hope there will be a
> possibility to evolve this concept further in some type of workgroup. I
> also see an interesting relation to the talk of machine translation where I
> believe we can do a lot very quickly if we limit the vocabulary to be
> included in such a tool
>
> Anders
>
>
> Denny Vrandečić skrev 2013-08-07 02:20:
>
>  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<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<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia>
>> >
>>
>>
>
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