[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] internationalization

[Andre Engels]

> 
> Hello,
> 
> In the german wikipedia some people are doing a hell of work in
> internationalizing - linking to the english and esperanto wikipedia
> mainly. (If someone wants to help out:
> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seiten%252C_die_nicht_ins_Englische_linken> 
> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seiten%252C_die_nicht_zu_Esperanto_linken>
> - it's more than 10 000 articles) 
> 
> Therefore I thought about a tool for it, which would make this work a lot
> faster and more comfortable. A demo (doing nothing, only
> visualizing the idea) can be found at:
> http://www.djini.de/Uploads/internationalisation.html
> 
> Please can someone implement something like this?

I have been thinking about this kind of thing myself as well - at the moment
we have 2 Wikipedias where such links can be added, but in the near future
there will probably be 5 or 6. Having a simpler method than working in each
separately for adding links would be very much preferred.

However, I think that a bit more than this would still be good. In the first
place, the restriction to only 3 languages is quite strict in some cases, and
as soon as you want to get more in, the amount of work blows up.

Secondly, blindly inserting those in the page would cause disasters, IMO.
In my opinion the software should check for:
* Existence of the pages that are being included. If one of the pages does
  not exist, error message
* Whether the link already exists. If the link already exists, don't add
  another one
* Whether there already exists a link to another page in the same language.
  If it does, an 'are you sure?' question should be added.

In the third place, your choice of languages is rather small. Where are
Polish, Spanish and Dutch? And what about Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish,
Danish, Italian, Catalan? Or all those smaller Wikipedias?

This is not to say the idea is a bad one, more to say what I would think would
be the best way to implement it.

---

For the long term, I think what we would like is to get those interlanguage
links out of the pages and instead have something like a separate Wiki where
all themes (or at least all themes that are on more than one Wikipedia) can
be found, with perhaps a stub of information but mostly an overview of all
pages on all Wikipedias that discuss the subject. The pages on the Wikipedias
would then be linked to one (or more) of these 'interwikipedia' pages, and get
information about what other language pages to link to there. Perhaps there
could also be information about what subjects are related.

But that's all something for the (far?) future - a tool like you propose would
not be as powerful, but a lot simpler to create.

Andre Engels