[Wikipedia-l] multilingual wikipedia

[Stephen Forrest]

On the topic of multilingual coordination at large, I have often
thought when adding interwiki links to pages that it would be nice to
have a central, language-independent repository of cross-language
links.

(Probably these issues have been raised before; sorry if I'm rehashing
old points or raising them in the wrong place.)

I've seen essentially two problems as is:
- links to new translations don't get added everywherewikipedia
- erroneous cross-language links can persist even after being
corrected somewhere

Robots can solve the first problem but not the second.  An example of
the second is 'Germanic languages'.  There are not too many wikipedias
that have any entry for this topic specifically.  However, someone had
linked a number of them to the equivalent for 'German language' in
other wikipedias, probably not realizing the difference.

I don't see how a robot could solve this problem without semantic
knowledge of the equivalents of 'Germanic language' in various
languages.

Steve