[Wikipedia-l] How to help the international Wikipedias along

[Larry Sanger]

Here's an idea that I will conclude (at the end of the post) isn't such a
good idea.  But it's worth thinking about.

As an extra line of links at the bottom of *every* page on *every*
Wikipedia, have this:

Read and edit an article on this topic in:
English -- Castellano -- Deutsch -- Francais -- German -- [etc.; the various
languages we have]

One simpleminded suggestion would have it that at the bottom of
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Foo , these links would be to, for example,
http://es.wikipedia.com/wiki/Foo and http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki/Foo , etc.

The problem of course is that "Foo" is not a word in Spanish.  :-)  Or if it
is, it probably means "rutabaga" or is very rude.  It requires very
specialized knowledge, which cannot be automated, to know where those links
should point.

So *can* we interlink similar pages between the various international
Wikipedias, in order to foster cross-pollination?  If so, how?  Well, I have
an idea that requires *minimal* programmer involvement (always a plus for
overworked programmers!).

Describe the new page here.

<font size="-1">[Castellano] -- [Catalan] -- [Deutsch] -- [English] --
[Esperanto] -- [Français] -- [Hanyu] -- [Italiano] -- [Ivrit] --
[Nihongo] -- [Português] -- [Russkiy] -- [Svensk]</font>

Note, the names are given in their own languages, so the text can be used
with all new language wikis; we'd could use this same text for all the
wikis.

What I'd like to have is some commented-out instructions right before the
list of languages (and *that* would have to be translated) but I'm not sure
there is any way to write comments in wiki-markup!  But, anyway, we'd have
something like this:

<!-- Please don't remove this notice!  If you identify an article on another
Wikipedia on a topic that corresponds exactly to this article's topic, then,
please, won't you add the URL of that other article, so that the language
name below points to that article? -->

Even if this comment notice can be added, the one big problem with this sche
me is that people just won't go to the trouble of putting in all the links.
In fact, that's probably the case--enough that perhaps we shouldn't go to
the trouble of doing this.

But maybe I'm not thinking of something here...maybe what's needed is a new
text box with special bells and whistles, but that's not going to happen
anytime soon, I'm sure.

Anyway, so my conclusion is that we shouldn't do anything along these lines
yet (unless someone can think up something brilliant), but eventually, we
might...

Well, one idea is just to make links on the [[Foo]] page point to a
corresponding [[Foo]] page on the other wikis; then, on those other wikis,
redirect [[Foo]] to the correct word in the other language.  In THAT case,
we should change the commented-out notice above.

Larry