Re: [Wikitech-l] GSoC proposals: Wikidata language fallback and conversion ( + one backup: category redirects )

Hello, I've drafted my proposal about language fallback and conversion issues for Wikidata at [1]. Currently Wikidata stores multilingual contents. Labels (names, descriptions etc) are expected to be written in every language, so every user can read them in their own language. But there're some problems currently: * If some content doesn't exist in some specific language, users with this exact language set in their preferences see something meaningless (its ID instead). This renders some language with fewer users (thus fewer labels filled) even unusable. * There're some similar languages which may often share the same value. Having strings populated for every language one by one wastes resources and may allow them out of sync later. * Even for languages which are not "that similar", MediaWiki already has some facility to transliterate (aka. convert) contents from its another sister language (aka. variant) which can be used to provide better results for users. This proposal aims at resolving these issues by displaying contents from another language to users based on user preferences (some users may know more than one languages), language similarity (language fallback chain), or the possibility to do transliteration, and allow proper editing on these contents. Although Wikidata is in its fast development stage, lots of data have been added to it. The later we resolve these issues, the more duplications may be created which will require more clean up work in the future, like what we had to face before / when the language converter (that transliteration system) was introduced for the Chinese Wikipedia. So I'm planning to do this project in this summer. There's also a backup proposal about category redirects at [2]. I wrote it because I really want to see it implemented too, either by me or someone else. Some of its contents may be also useful for other participants willing to do this project. Comments are welcome and appreciated. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Liangent/wb-lang [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Liangent/cat-redir -Liangent _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l