International Wikipedia question

Hey, I saw on Larry Sanger's to do list at Larry Sanger/To do that he planned to form a philosophy about the international wikipedia question. Could someone enlighten me as to what that question is? Also, feel free to move this to meta if this is where you feel it belongs...

--Chuck_Smith


Yep, should be moved toMeta-Wikipedia or else Intlwiki-L, where a lengthy discussion of said question has already taken place! See the archives. --LMS


Today, I reread all of the archive of Intlwiki-L, but I do not understand what the question is... What is it? --Chuck Smith


There are several questions. The main one that bothers me is whether and how Wikipedia articles in different languages might be made to correspond to one another. --Larry_Sanger


For link management between international wikis, I will (in time) make [[de:Krimskrams]] as a link to a Krimskrams article in the German wikipedia. If this is put into the [[Stuff]] article, it won't display as a normal link, but list it as "German version of this article" somewhere in the framework. Once a day/week/etc. all wikipedias could be automatically cross-referenced, keeping all of these links in all wikipedias up to date.

We can also use {{de:Krimskrams}} or {{{de:Krimskrams}}}, if you want the [[de:Krimskrams]] version for "normal" linking. --Magnus Manske


What about a drop down menu in the navigation bar that links to all the pedias? --joao


If you still wanted to do the instantly jump to another language idea then one way to implement would be to use the same approach as the Traduki project which uses Esperanto as an interlanguage since 99% of Esperanto words have only one definition. The dictionaries on travlang.com also uses this method (using Esperanto) on their multilingual online translation. Just an idea...

This also fits because Esperanto was basically an open source project before the term open source project was coined. One guy designed the foundation of the language and then tons of people from different countries worked on it from there... Also, because of the nature of the Esperanto community, I imagine that the Esperanta vikipedio will become a strong community once the pages are transformed into Unicode (which we're patiently or impatiently waiting for...) --Chuck_Smith


But not enough people know Esperanto!

Sorry we haven't gotten around to changing the code. You can always pester Jimbo again at jwales at bomis.com.

The problem isn't mainly a technical one. It's mainly a sort of philosophical or policy one: should we make articles correspond to one another? If so, how? --Larry_Sanger


True, there aren't enough people who know Esperanto... so I'll do all the work! j/k  ;-)

I like the link idea of syntax [[de:article]] to link to the German wikipedia and these would be quality links because then people would only add them if the content was good (at least in principle). It seems ashame that knowledge on the Internet is still divided by language. I believe those who know more than one language would appreciate seeing a link to view another language they might know better. The slants on articles in different languages is quite fascinating! --Chuck_Smith


Hi, i'm Tuxisuau and I am near alone in the Catalan Wikipedia project. I did a bit of work, but before letting people come in thousands, i need to solve some problems. Should I use characters like àáä€¢ï· in article names? Should i use them inside the articles? What i've got to do with existing articles with wrong names (some have "'`"'s and some have not but then they are wrong written)?. Help!

--Tuxisuau


Well, I think for a temporary solution I really like the {{de:Katze}} to link to the German wikipedia and this would simply add to the sidebar on the side of that article, Other languages: and list which other languages this article is in. I'm really getting tired of writing articles in the English and Esperanto language wikipedias and not easily being able to link them together... --Chuck Smith