Talk:A newer look at the interlanguage link

Prologue

I think, there is a big minus in this idea. In the old system it is enough to know, like the subject of the article would be named in another language. For instance, if you create the article "Париж" in ru-wiki and you know, that the town is named Paris in french, you can try to find the article in fr-wiki to interwikilink. That's easy. In the new system you have to know, in which language the article was created first. How will you know?

Simply, copy the {{#interlanguage}} bit from Paris :) Nikola 19:40, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

In the old system it's easy to unite two "islands", e.g. en-fr-da with bg-uk-de. How will it work in the new system?

If two "islands" appear, it will mean that there are two articles on the central wiki about the same subject. For example, en-fr-da have central wiki page X, while bg-uk-de have central wiki page Y.

As a quick fix, simply redirect Y to X. As a good fix, change en-fr-da links from X to Y. It is still less work than in current system. Nikola 19:40, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Now I will stop critizise, because I see a lot of pluses ;-) --Obersachse 21:35, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I consider all possible flaws, noted by Obersachse, as minor. But he is right in the point that this proposal is about creation of some completely new namespace, which needs to be managed by someone. What should be such a «central wiki»? What will be the keys: words of some language, arbitrary index numbers, or some classificator? Who will administrate it, e.g. split or delete keys? Another major obstacle is inconsistency of translation of some terms between some languages, even sometimes incompartible views of different wikipedias; see Interwiki conflicts and talk page. The proposed system could be used in arranging interwiki about persons, films and other well-distinguishable objects. But it will put Wikipedia in a nightmare when we will link scientific terms and commonly used words between languages. Incnis Mrsi 23:37, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

A central wiki should be a new wiki, for example at http://interlanguage.wikimedia.org . Page names should be words of some language, I suggested article name in the first language that covers a subject, but that is on the Wikimedia community to decide. As there are people who are active in maintaining current interlanguage system by running a herd of interlanguage bots, I believe that same people will be interested in maintaining the interlanguage wiki. I'll take a longer look at interwiki conflicts, but in ways similar to those used now, they could also be solved with the Interlanguage Extension. Nikola 19:47, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I strongly support this! And I hope it doesn't get ignored (regarding its realization) like MediaZilla:4547 was/is, for example. Many thanks for your MediaWiki extension, Nikola! --- Greetings, Melancholie 01:55, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Extra possibilities

I hope that another possibility out of this is to be able to construct a language neutral Wikipedia URL to give to somebody, and based on browser identification, it will give the right language version. Now _that_ would be nice (and seems possible with the information we have here. --Alias 16:01, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

By itself, the extension wouldn't allow something like that, but it could make making such a thing easier in the future. Nikola 19:30, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Ger rid of bots at last

Once the system is implemented, we will get rid of interwiki bot edits that really ruin the "Recent Changes" page (and probably use lots of servers' resources). I wish this project all possible success. Amikeco 12:17, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I think that then other jobs can done by bots. Find and connecting islands. Solving redirects, spelling. But with the growing number of wiki's the bots without botflags are ruining the RC page. So please report the bots without flag and block them or give them that botflag. CarsracBot 14:19, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

about Wiktionary:Translations

If this method can be applied to Wiktionary:Translations, would be better.--Dingar 12:40, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't see that it could be applied directly. Of course, it could be used for Wiktionary interlanguage links. Nikola 19:27, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

It could use similar code for maintaining a single list of terms asociated with an article, but would have to be a separate wiktionary extension. -- sj | help translate |+ 21:56, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Interlanguage Wiki?

Just a quick question, what exactly would go on the interlanguage wiki page for an article? Just language links. Maybe a soft redirect. Because I know when you put the links on the interlanguage wiki page, the page will just come up blank. Parent5446 23:02, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

What could be nice - and helpful to find errors as well - is an automatic generated list for each language on the interlanguage page listing the first sentence or sentences of each article. For instance: (for the article Paris)

nl:Parijs

Parijs (Frans: Paris) is de hoofdstad en regeringszetel van Frankrijk.

en:Paris

Paris (pronounced /ˈpærɨs/ in English;[3] [paʁi] (help·info) in French) is the capital city of France.

ru:Париж

Париж (фр. Paris, трансл.: Пари́) — столица Франции, важнейший экономический и культурный центр страны, расположенный в северной части центральной Франции, в регионе Иль-де-Франс на берегах реки Сены.

fr:Paris

Paris (prononcé /pa.ʁi/) est la ville la plus peuplée et la capitale de la France, chef-lieu de la région d’Île-de-France et unique commune-département du pays.

gan:巴黎

巴黎（法語：Paris）係法國嗰首都，位到喺塞納河岸舷上，係法蘭西大島嗰中心。巴黎市區有到2005年估計 2,153,600人 [1]。巴黎大都會區人口有993萬 [2]，哈有條兜巴黎一圈嗰通勤帶，攏共115萬人 [3]，係歐洲人口最多嗰地區之一 [4] 。

etcetera... for all languages if possible. (While I am making this list I see the difficulties... templates... images... disambiguations which are often at the beginning of each page) Ellywa 19:41, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

You can do it manually of course, and I'm not sure if it would be practical to make an extension that would do it automatically. Perhaps a bot could help... ;) Nikola 19:49, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

It would come up blank, but you would have the links in the bottom left. Just mouse-over a known language and see what it's about. Of course, it would probably be practical for a page to have some basic info. Nikola 19:49, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps this wiki should have pages with (automatic?/template?) tables in which every interwikilink to that page is present (as overview), like:

fr	Paris	la capitale de la France
nl	Parijs	de hoofdstad van Frankrijk

A method is that it has to be entered on the pages hand by hand.

Another method could be that the onliest thing what is needed to change the descriptionpage on the interwikiproject, is to add a kind of template/language code (or better) like {{interlanguage|<id>|<description>}} or [[interlanguage:<id>|<description>]] on the pages of the various projects in all sort of languages. <id> = the pagename/way of identification on the interlanguageproject. <description> = the description of the page in that language, in the example of Paris, that would be on the fr-wiki: la capitale de la France or France, la capitale. Just like a category, when a page is added to a category, it appears in that on the interlanguage-page (with language-code and description) without having to do anything (if the category already exists). And an interwikilanguage-page should be created when it doesn't exist yet. Just like a category it is possible (not always needed) to add more information on the page, in cases when the language isn't understandable for people like as example for Europeans the Japanese characters.

This is an interesting idea, but I guess it will be easier to just go with article introductions. Nikola 21:26, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

But the names of the pages, what should it be? Options are:

• (a) numbers like an identification-code;
  • Numbers are language independent.
  • If the name of an article/subject/town/country/etc changes, the name of the interwikiprojectpage doesn't have to change.
  • A disadvantage may be that a number doesn't say much about the subject (however there could be some sort of code present like only the first three digests for very large groups of subjects, like "400..." for topographical entities).
• (b) the name of the page in the first language who created the interwikilink;
  • A pont in Dutch (ferry) is something different than a pont in French (bridge), and this could be a problem for many subjects. Both in different languages as in the same language words that are written the same have different meanings and different pages.
  • It can or will be a rubish with all the pages in at least hundred langauges (and growing).
  • No need for determining which name should be the one for the interlanguage-pages.
• (c) a standard language which is used to create interwikilinks with;
  • As already said on this page, that there is no need for a language which is more equal than another.
  • A standard language like the English is for the MediaWiki software is easy.
  • If there isn't a page in English about a subject, it still should be possible creating an interlanguagelink, what will be become more difficult to dertermine the right name.

Perhaps more things will come up in the comming days. - I like this idea, have thought about it for years. Romaine 01:00, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Regarding (a), people and numbers don't mix. I'm not sure that that would work well.

Regarding (b), yes, this could be a problem. It will be possible to disambiguate however, for example have articles "pont (nl)" and "pont (fr)". "Rubbish" will still be much better than what we have right now - we have tens or hundreds interlanguage links, each of which may be in an ununderstandable language. This way, we will have a single link which may be ununderstandable. Nikola 21:26, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Under #Central database and types of objects you describe a nice method of naming subjects, based on their original name, scientific name in biology, topographical names based on their origin. How more neutral names are possible, the better. Romaine 21:28, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Name of the interlanguage article

If I want add a link to the article that has none interwiki link jet I have to try every possible translation of the title of that article. Aspecially the chinese article names are very hard to find. If for example the zh wikipedia is imported first and then the english one, then a lot of articles are very unfindable for the english speaking under us. So I propose that it can be found under every possible translation of the article title. So on the interwiki wikipedia server it is posslble to create new entries and link articles to that. And at that moment you see the name of that article in the different names. And also it nice to still see the interwiki links to the different languages directly. If that is not possible is suggest that the article title are translated in the 10 biggest languages of the wikipedia. And that maximal 10 articles there are with the same content with those interwiki links CarsracBot 12:23, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

In my response i proposed using any wiki title in the group, so you could link to the group from any wiki. Platonides 09:30, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

If I understood clearly your idea, that wouldn't work because of wikis that use same names for different concepts. Nikola 19:45, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

This is the lamest idea in wikipedia ever. Currently system is very good and why need to change to something strange? Why need other wiki? It will make a lot of confusions and nothing realy good. Let's work to solve current interwiki conflicts and all of things will be ok. Hugo.arg 07:15, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

The interwiki system is very good when there are only a few languages. When there are 100 languages each small change of a title of an article on one of the languages requires 100 edits. A new article needs also 100 edits on other wikipedia's. Thats why the interwiki bots are getting buysier every day. Ellywa 19:50, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Otherwise, there are also a lot of interwikiconflicts. So leave "the very good" part, because mistakes created by bots and people occur often enough. And that will be out of date with this functionality. Romaine 19:37, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Translation

Talking about such an theme depending not only the english language wikipedia without using other languages is impossible. Where are the translations of the proposal? Marcus Cyron 12:40, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

The proposal is under GFDL, everyone is free to translate it to any language. Nikola 19:43, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Philosophy: ontology

In the end this will be a test for the philosophical problem: whether there is a common ontology which lies beneath (and is independent of) the surface-language. – Kaihsu 13:08, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

If I have understood correctly, this proposal isn’t really trying to force everything into one language-independent ontology. If we were planning to map all concepts e.g. to English, the initiative would be doomed to fail, but that is not how it would work. If a term exists only in, say, Finnish and (Finland-)Swedish, you can just use the Finnish or Swedish term to name the subject. The only difference compared to the current method is that the links would be stored in a central location. --Silvonen 10:00, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

I see signs of consensus on the point, that we should start only in a small sector of Wikipedia's "ontology space". The language-independent ontology exists on some questions. Incnis Mrsi 12:43, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Ideally there should be a language-independent ontology. It must not necessarily be based on English or on any other language, but on common sense, which all people hopefully share.

But even when such ontology is hard to establish - technically speaking, when there are interwiki conflicts - this extension doesn't force a solution. The old way of inter-linking articles can still be used after it is enabled until all conflicts are resolved and a common ontology is found. --Amir E. Aharoni 07:20, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Interesting, but...

...how to make the first link to a "central wiki", and what exactly is the "central" wiki for interwiki linkng? Surely, it has to be something new, because an exisiting wiki would be unacceptable, since all wikis are equal, and we don't want some wikis to be more equal than others.

One thing I would like to see, is that all index information (categories, interwikis) move to another namespace. This would reduce the errors introduced by newbies who remove those strange lines they don't understand, and it would make it possible to maintain the interwikis on protected pages. It would also reduce the long list of edits in my watchlist, and make the work of automated systems to maintain the interwikilinks easuer and faster. Since each page has its own talk page, creating an index namespace doesn't seem a technically difficult thing to do to me - Quistnix 00:52, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

The proposal suggests a central wiki ("interlanguage.wikimedia.org"). giggy _(:O) 03:42, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

When you first translate a page (or notice that there are two unlinked pages about the same topic), you would have to create a page on the central wiki with interlanguage links to both pages. I am thinking about modifying the extension so that it would display a red link to the central wiki if the page is not there, which would ease the process, but is otherwise not necessary. Nikola 20:47, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

This is now done, the red link towards the central wiki is displayed if it doesn't have the requested page. Nikola 08:31, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Central database and types of objects

It may be useful to create and manage some central database, but I strongly oppose to relaying on terms in natural languages. It will make English more equal than others if English will be used in the central database, but in essentially multilingual database will me a lot of confusion (word collisions, duplicates etc.).

I agree that there are potential problems, but I don't see how could it be done otherwise, and anyway it won't be worse than the current system. Nikola 21:12, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

We should start to use such a centralized system only for some classes of objects, like persons, organizations, some types of works of art, chemical substances, astronomical and geographical objects, some type of historical events, biological species. The criterion should be: such objects must be well distinguishable and, possibly, hierarchically ordered.

Also, we should supply an additional information for that objects, to make incorrect binding almost impossible. Persons have birth dates, organizations – official names, films and books – year of release, astronomical and geographical objects in some cases may be identified by approximate values of coordinates. Also, we should use existing (external) keys as strong as possible, such as latin names for species, IMDB index for films, CAS registry numbers for substances. We should obtain not only a piece of syntactic sugar for interwiki, but a semantically useful system. Incnis Mrsi 22:13, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Full support. --Obersachse 15:00, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Why no start with for example species which are described with their Latin names added? Romaine 20:57, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, instead of always using the name in the first language, this is another possibility: use the "most basic" name if possible. Plants and animals could go by the Latin name, chemicals by their chemical formula or CAS number, astronomical objects by their catalogue number, people and places by their name in their language (though the last two may be a point of contention). Nikola 21:12, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Then you covered most of the subjects, except for the "general subjects" mostly part of society. But I like the idea much. Romaine 21:19, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Update: for discretion of object types we can use an existing concept of namespace. Will creation of moderate number of namespaces (maybe about one hundred) take a lot of resources? Incnis Mrsi 12:31, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

You mean like Geography:London and Geography:Paris, or something different? Romaine 16:36, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Come to think of it, this could make all the categories unified and internationalized, too. Now every wiki maintains its own category tree, even though ultimately there should be just one tree, with category names translated into different languages. --Amir E. Aharoni 07:22, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Why semantically significant keys are required

I just finished fixing a horrible interwiki clash in w:Jalalabad. Articles on three different sites were incorrectly linked together. Bengali and Bishnupriya Manipuri Wikipedias mean w:Jalalabad, Punjab, Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia means w:Jalalabad, Shahjahanpur district, Uttar Pradesh, and other languages have articles about the city in Afghanistan.

Would interwiki „star“ (instead of clique) prevent this? No, it will not. Would the use of, say, latitude and longitude prevent this? Yes, of course. I oppose to any kind of numbered systems, or language-based identifiers, which would not able give us some protection against such cases. Incnis Mrsi 15:51, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Numbered system and possibilities

To avoid problems related to language-neutrality, we could use a numbered system by sequentially numbering the pages as they are added. Inter:1226, for example, might link en:Blue iguana, eo:Blua igvano and es:Cyclura lewisi. This would avoid problems of over-dependence on one language and semantic drift caused by pages titles being pegged to one language. The name of the page could be displayed as the user's preference language (as a user with English as the preference language, Inter:1226 would be displayed as ":en:Blue iguana"). Potentially, en.wikipedia could place [[inter:Blue iguana]] at the bottom of their article and this would automatically link to Inter:1226 based on the inclusion of en:Blue iguana on that inter page (or this could be entirely automated based upon the presence of a link to the article on an interwiki page). This would make for very low maintenance of links to the interwiki on individual language Wikipedias.

Each inter page would effectively describe a relationship between articles in different languages ("en:X:is the same topic as fr:Y"). It might be useful to use modified MediaWiki software such as Semantic MediaWiki or that on OmegaWiki to make the pages more dynamic and easy-to-edit. This would also provide software more appropriate for, essentially, a database project. Further, relationships between topics could be described (if software like Semantic MediaWiki were used). This would provide another way to browse Wikipedia, and present a useful semantically-meaningful hierarchy of topics on Wikipedia. It would also allow the contents of different language Wikipedias to be linked in more dynamic ways and for the emphases of different language Wikipedias to be compared.

Finally, where appropriate, links to different Wikimedia projects such as Commons, Wiktionary and WikiSource could be added to these interpages. Inter:254 might list en:William Shakespeare, de:William Shakespeare..., and then link to Commons:William Shakespeare, books:Author:William Shakespeare, books:de:William Shakespeare... Samples of each link (such as the first two sentences or the first image) could be included on the inter page.

We should probably aim low at first and create a project that does the basic job of providing lists of related interwiki links. Once this is of a sufficient completeness, it could be integrated into other Wikimedia projects at their discretion. The project could be later embellished with semantic relationships and other features if there were community consensus and developers interested in the project. --Oldak Quill 05:43, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, number index is a solution better than text strings lacking any system, but there are some risks even in it. Imagine a merger of two interwiki clusters. You will mark one of two indexes as deprecated, isn't it? But later somebody recovers, that they was not just the same thing (at least concerning some of languages), and will claim back that index. Or do you consider creation some third one? Also, splitting may cause problems. IMCO we should not base such centralized interwiki system on sequential or random number indexes. Starting with external keys (and general extensible syntax) on some little part of Wikipedia space would be wiser. In any case, numbers or not, but it would be useful to provide also an interwiki-redirect mechanism not for regular use, but as a last resort in error-correction. E.g. in the time of fixing an error some involved articles may be protected. Incnis Mrsi 12:18, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

The problem you describe is hardly a problem of number-based-identification. The same problem would occur with a frase describing the clusters. The (in my opinion) very important advantage of using numbers instead of frases is that we do not make any language superior to another. I can hardly imagine the disruption caused if we used English (or Dutch, or any other language) as primary key... A primary key consisting of numbers would solve that problem. Mwpnl 21:36, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion: Start small

While this sounds fascinating (presuming that I even understand what's being suggested), I agree with a poster above that things of "unique" or "semi-unique" (I'll explain in a moment) nature would seem to be where this proposal would excel, and many other things/articles with which it would (I presume) fail miserably.

What this proposal apparently is hinged on, is the presumed intuitive associative linking between "name" and "article content". It's something that we, as users of wikis, presume in our usage. Click on a name, and you get content. However, outside of the wiki, things can be a bit more "muddy".

Essentially this proposal would seem to work well with articles which have a name which may be considered indisputable (or semi-indisputable - I noted this in the "unique" comment above).

I think just doing this with articles that (in most cases) would have a "unique" name could be a good idea.

So to start, how about person-related articles?

Then perhaps expand this to "groups". Each group's preferred name would be the "core" of the stellar heirarchy); including organisations, corporations, governments, etc. (Also keep in mind that the above - articles on persons and groups - can also be some of the most controversial articles.)

And from there, expand to things which have unique, specific, individual names, such as paintings and geographical and astronomical locations. (There is a difference between the UK (a geographical name), and the government of the UK (a "group").)

Overall though, I just am reluctant to support this for things such as "ball" or "dream" or "green" or "liberty" or "weapon".

Nicely intended idea, but due to the differences in naming and types of naming, I'm not sure that this is a "good idea" as it stands.

Is it at least better than the current system? Nikola 18:54, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Further thoughts are welcome. - Jc37 03:09, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Considering the (quite rightly) general jumpiness over BLP related stuff, I don't think it's the best starting point. I think Countries would a good starting point... unlikely to rename, fairly stable, mostly already interwiki linked... giggy _(:O) 03:58, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Starting "in reverse" might be a good idea, too. The "order of operation" was merely a suggestion : ) - Jc37 04:01, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Starting small is a good idea. I suggest starting with articles that have the most interwiki links , because that has the most effect, for instance many of the articles in w:Wikipedia:Core topics - 1,000. HenkvD 18:59, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps it would be best to start with articles that have "international" names and that are in 1:1 relation on all Wikipedias. For example, articles about years (2008), numbers (1) astronomical objects... (Category:NGC objects)... Nikola 18:54, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Starting small seems to me a good idea. Other option of starting point, base it on species with their latin names. But I do think that we just need to start, where-ever that may be, but how do we get the developers so far... Romaine 16:41, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

A whole wiki for this?

Seems slightly pointless, and the idea of centrality hints me towards Meta. Maybe we could have these interwiki link banks stored in uneditable cache's, in a way that wouldn't encumber the server much. --Anonymous Dissident^Talk 08:35, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

The point is well explained. While technically it would be possible to use Meta, it would be unsuitable for the task, as it is a separate project with well-defined (and completely different) goals. If the interlanguage links would be uneditable, there would truly be no point whatsoever. Nikola 10:57, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

The separate wiki dedicated to interwiki links looks completely reasonable to me. It eases the implementation and gives editors a familiar interface. Meta is not Meta-Wikipedia, it is Meta-WikiMedia, while this extension is separate for Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikispecies etc. --Amir E. Aharoni 13:50, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

And what about to have just a new namespace at Meta (instead of a new wiki), called "Interlanguage links"? Is it possible? Is it useful? Helder 10:35, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

I believe that deciding whether to use a new namespace on Meta or a new auxiliary wiki is just a formality. The most difficult part would be to decide how it's all going to work. Eklipse 05:08, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Commons

I think will be also good idea to keep Commons links in such database. Specific of Commons links - they are not unique, for example article and category could refer to same Commons category. --EugeneZelenko 03:37, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree. Most drastic interwiki clashes are caused by common names for various organisms, great portion of which can be solved by Commons-like system, where each clade is placed by one page, by its scientific name. The point is that commons is meant (I think) to seek page titles to be neutral among various languages. --Puzzlet Chung 01:22, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

This is a good point. Also that sometimes one word in one language has multiple different meanings in another language. Ther eis need for specialization of this etension to deal with such matters. But starting with something simple will give us definite toosl to criticize and improve. -- sj | help translate |+

Link to the interwiki list

I am really really really interested in interwiki links and i am trying to lead a project on a few wikis to improve them. On he.wiki it is very successful and i am trying to export it to ru.wiki, eo.wiki and a few more. Maybe en.wiki, one day. See here for details:

• en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Interlanguage Links/Ideas from the Hebrew Wikipedia.

I think that it is a wonderful idea and it should be rolled out ASAP. I don't see any major problem with it.

Here's an idea for improvement, though. Make an easy link for editing the interwiki links. I think that the best idea would be to have on the editing page, like links to template pages: When you edit a page, you see a list of links to templates that it uses below the editing pane. Add a link to the interwiki list there.

I'll be sending a few more ideas for improvement soon. --Amir E. Aharoni 13:36, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Conflicts

I have a Perl script that analyzes a static dump of a Wikipedia in any language and finds several types of problems in interwiki links:

1. Multiple links to one foreign article from several local articles. (see an example in eo.wiki: eo:Vikipedio:Interlingvaj ligiloj/Ligiloj de pluraj esperantaj artikoloj al unu alilingva artikolo)
2. Multiple links to several foreign articles from one local article. (see an example in eo.wiki: eo:Vikipedio:Interlingvaj ligiloj/Ligiloj de unu esperanta artikolo al pluraj artikoloj en unu lingvo)

... And also a few others, but these are the most important for this discussion.

As long as there are such conflicts, this extension cannot be fully rolled out. But i tested it in your test wiki and it seems that the old interwiki links can happily live together with the new extension.

Fixing these conflicts requires manual work, and quite a lot of it, but i believe that resolving them all and fully replacing the old interwikis with this extension will be very beneficial to Wikipedia. If you have ideas about spreading this project to other languages or integrating it somehow with the roll-out of this extension, let me know.

I think that it's really important and relevant, so if you didn't understand anything, please let me know, too :) --Amir E. Aharoni 13:47, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

I hope a common use of interlanguage links will help resolving conflicts like en:A links to eo:B but eo:B does not link back to en:A but to en:C etc. Indeed a lot of manual work is involved, but I think it is much less as fixing it on all languages.

As you tested the old interwiki links can happily live together with the new extension I don't see these conflicts as blocking points. HenkvD 22:29, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

When i say "fully rolled out", i mean that it can be enabled, but not used in all articles. --Amir E. Aharoni 20:14, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

As I mentioned above, this is not simply a matter of conflicts; sometimes ther eare two words for something in one language and only one in another. I think it could still be rolled out for those articles; you would simply need to program in how it shoud function when it encounters those 3 types of conflicts. -- sj | help translate |+

Good proposal: available to work on this

I like this idea. I independently made a similar proposal in the English Wikipedia [1] and in the Italian one [2]. Therefore I am available to support and improve this one.--Dejudicibus 18:20, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

A systemic approach

Let us approach this proposal in a sistemic way.

Terms

• Page stands for a page containing an article
• Interpage stands for a page containing the interwiki links

Scenario

Let us suppose that I create a new article in Italian Wikipedia. Let us call it it:N(it) where it: means that it is published in the Italian Wikipedia and N(it) means that its name is in Italian language. The corresponding article(s) in another Wikipedia would be xx:N(xx/1) ... xx:N(xx/n). I assume there could be two or more article either because it is possible that an article in a language may correspond to more articles in another one, or because of other projects (images, quotes, and so forth). I am just assuming the most general scenario.

Questions

To design an interwiki architecture I have to be able to answer at least the following questions:

1. how do I know if a inter:N page does already exist?
2. if it does not exist, how should I create it?
3. which should be the name of page?
4. in which language should be written that page?
5. which instruction should I place in my page to link the interwiki page?

Dependencies

Answer 3 depends on answer 1. Answer 3 and 4 are related. Answer 5 partially depends on answer 1. Answer 2 partially depends on answer 1.

So answer 1 has priority.

Answer 1

A method could be the following:

A: first of all, I could search in Interwiki site for translation of N(it) in the most common languages, like English or Spanish. I can find a translation by using an on-line dictionary. We could also use wiktionary. If I get a result, I also get the inter:N page.

B: if I get no reply, I can signal the new page in a specific section on interwiki site, that is, pages searching for interpages. Every wikipedian who is aware that such an interpage exists, may associate the new page to the corresponding interpage.

C: if I get no reply and after a 15 days period nobody will associate my new page to an existing interwiki page, I am allowed to create a new interwiki page. To do that I have to load a template and use it to create the new page.

D: if in future some wikipedian realizes that there are two interpages referring to the same conceptual entry, a merge process will be applied.

Answer 2

To create a new interpage, I have only to create it from a specific template.

Answer 3

This is difficult. Using the name of the first article would may confuse users, because I might not be able to even read that name, if written in an alphabeth different from mine. In my opinion there is only a solution: to take advantage of the wiktionary. In fact, each wiktionary in a specific language does not contain only terms in that language, but in theory terms in any language. So it is the perfect candidate to support an interwiki project.

So, when I create the new article in Italian Wikipedia, I have only to add [[inter:it:N(it)]] at the bottom of my page. Each interpage is associated to an UID that, however, it is hidden. A Google like index of all UID and the corresponding N(xx) terms is available. If any N(xx) already exist, I can get to that page by search, and add N(it) to the list, so that I associate that UID to N(it). When I click on [[inter:it:N(it)]] the search engine finds the UID and display the corresponding page. Since I said I was coming from it Wikipedia, N(it) will be displayed as title. If I would been arrived there from fr Wikipedia, I would have seen N(fr) assuming N(fr) was already associated to the UID.

Answer 4

Since I use a template and I know from which wikipedia I come from, the header titles of sections and few other elements will be in the same language I am coming from. Of course, each link will be in the corresponding language.

Answer 5

[[inter:xx:N(xx)]]

Discussion

The questions that you pose are important and well written, but the answers aren't so complicated.

1. Finding the Interwiki page is easy - just search a foreign Wikipedia in a language you know and copy. If you don't find it - create a new page.
2. If there already is one - merge them and redirect the one you created (it works with redirection - see the Belgrade in testwiki). Waiting for 15 days is not needed - it should be a wiki-wiki / be-bold / ignore-all-rules approach.
3. It is not important. This is so utterly unimportant because this system will be almost a fire-and-forget thing. It may be English, it may be the language in which the article is first created, and it may be a number. It is not important. If, for example, the interwiki page is called "פרימו לוי" and reading Hebrew letters is hard for you, then you can just create a redirect called "Primo Levi" and use it. I can't think of any problems with this approach. This must not raise any political arguments, such as you find on en:Talk:Pablo Casals or en:Talk:Kiev - it is a purely technical issue. It is just not important.
4. This is actually important. Maybe a commons approach can work here - give a short summary of the content of the article in all languages. See what i tried to do in Belgrade in the testwiki. This description is important, because it will help editors whether the link is appropriate. (User:Ellywa proposed something very similar in one of the discussions above.)
5. See answer 2. You can put {{#interlanguage:פרימו לוי}} or {{#interlanguage:Primo Levi}}, whatever is convenient to you.

All these things are very simple and straightforward. I really really hope that this will be implemented as soon as possible.

Oh, and i don't really see how Wiktionary will be technically useful here. You can, of course, use it to help in your search, but it doesn't need to be plugged into the system. For example, names of people and places shouldn't be in Wiktionary, but in Wikipedia. --Amir E. Aharoni 13:39, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Request to enable in Wikipedia

I really liked this idea and didn't know whether anyone actually plans to enable it in Wikipedia, so i decided to be bold and filed a request for it in Bugzilla:

• https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15607

I hope that this is the right thing to do if i want this to go forward.

Your comments and votes are welcome. --Amir E. Aharoni 22:05, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Questions from David Göthberg

Quoting David Göthberg from en:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical):

I took a look. It seems that technically it is fairly sound, but only fairly. There still are some issues:

1. The central interlanguage.wikimedia.org wiki has to be deployed and tested.
2. There still is the grand discussion about how the articles on the central interlanguage wiki should be named. Should they be in English (but some things don't even have an English name), or in the language of the first article on the subject (well, that would make many titles just ??????? for many of us and I can't even cut and paste the names of articles in some of those languages), or should they perhaps simply use numbers (perhaps not as user friendly but at least works technically)?
3. There are some other issues how to describe on the interlanguage page what it is about. Should for instance the interwiki links on that page be put in small templates with link + short description? Or should we instead (or perhaps as an additional option) use such a template on the Wikipedias? That is, interlanguage link + description, then a bot can copy that to the interlanguage wiki page.

So here are my replies:

1. I mentioned it in the Bugzilla report. It shouldn't be a big deal, i think that there are a few people here who know how to install MW. If something specific is needed, then i guess that the creator of the extension can help.
2. I don't really think that it is so grand. See my reply above (search the page for "This is so utterly unimportant"). I really don't think that it should be the thing that slows down the adoption of this extension. If it starts to smell like a political discussion - even though it really should not - just give them number names. Ugly, but neutral. Neutral, but ugly. Whatever - it's not important.
3. How to describe? Technically it is simple, but a new level of discussion between different Wikipedias should develop there. I don't think that it's something that can be decided before the extension is rolled out. I have a lot of experience with meticulous manual correction on interwiki links across different Wikipedias and i have some more thoughts about it; i'll write them down in a separate paragraph some time soon. --Amir E. Aharoni 20:32, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Meaning of "local" interlanguage links could change

If this system comes into effect, the meaning of "local" interlanguage links, interwiki links other than centralized ones, could change into something else.

Interwiki links used to indicate that what the article describes is exactly what the other articles stands for, per each link, and also vice versa for all the articles it links to. It's both many-to-one and one-to-many.

After centralized interwiki system, all the interwiki links in each project becomes "locally managed", and could be one-way, meaning that the article here could mean what the article there stands for, but the article there links back to another article here, thus not vice versa.

Local project could decide their own guidelines for interwiki links too.

But all of these are under an assumption that no interwiki bots are around trying to "fix" that.

--Puzzlet Chung 01:44, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

It's probably OK. I would rather have all interwikis move from local Wikipedias to the centralized iwiki, but your proposal could be a good compromise for people who don't want too much centralized control. I won't object to that. And of course i agree with your point about the bots - since it's local, bots must not sync them the way they sync them now. --Amir E. Aharoni 16:17, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I like the idea of local links beikng the additions to the unifversally understood shared links across a topic or theme --this might be one way of ealing with the case of one term having two meanings in one language and one in another; at least where there is a 'majority' notion of termness and just a small # of languages that have a different grouping of meanings into terms. -- sj | help translate |+

Sorting order

There is a rather cosmetic issue with this extension. It makes all wikis that use it show the interwiki links in the same order. This is a problem, since some Wikipedias decided on a particular order for the languages. For example, in Hebrew and Hungarian Wikipedias English must be first. See Interwiki sorting order for a full list.

However, this is more of an opportunity for improvement than a problem. The order of the appearance of the links can be forced by a gadget, for example he:MediaWiki:Gadget-InterwikiOrder.js. The Wikipedias that opted to order the links by the language code has probably done it because it is easier for the editors, even though it is meaningless for the reader. Now this meaningless order is no longer relevant, as the order can be forced for the whole Wikipedia, or by each separate user. Yes, that means that i personally support ordering the languages by their actual name, so Suomi (fi, Finnish) is sorted by the S and not by the F, but if any Wikipedia still wants to order them by the language code, i don't mind.

Of course, the Wikipedias which have special rules - such as Hebrew, Hungarian, Yiddish, Telugu and others - can force their order, too. --Amir E. Aharoni 22:04, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

This isn't quite the case, you can set the way extension will sort the links, and I do plan to extend this so that various Wikipedias could introduce their own rules. See mw:Extension:Interlanguage#Installation. You are right that this is an opportunity to introduce more natural sorting on more wikis. Nikola 16:40, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

This is now done, and various Wikipedias may introduce their own sorting order. Nikola 08:22, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Fresh thoughts

I have been meditating all week about this project which I find extremely useful and worth implementing. First, the main problem with the text on the proposal page and the bugzilla description is that it is far from complete, comprehensive and practical. We can't expect it to be accepted by the community if it doesn't tackle with all the issues pertaining to this proposal. I'll try to be brief with my ideas:

About the process

The fundamental purpose of this proposal it to greatly simplify the process of adding and managing the interlanguage links on more than a hundred projects. While it does the managing job easily, the process of finding and adding interlanguage links seems to be the hardest issue to solve.

• What was before:
  • An editor adds an interlanguage link pointing to an article in a familiar language.
  • The process gets repeated by other users for different languages.
• What may become:
  • An editor has to go to the new Interlanguage wiki (which might be written in an unfamiliar language)
  • The editor has to find the relevant interpage. Its title may be written in a foreign language or it may be a number; either case it might be impossible to find.
  • Finding the relevant page by searching has its flaws. Suppose that a Portuguese editor finished writing pt:Same (a city in Timor-Leste) and wanted to interlink it to the same article written in a language he knows, id:Same in Indonesian. He goes to the interlanguage wiki and searches for the world "Same" which gives him numerous results: ro:Same (a city in Tanzania) and sv:Same (a disambiguation page) among them. And supposing that the Indonesian article may not even be included yet, and the interpages resulting from the search may be totally incomprehensible to him, will he assume that the ro interpage or the sv interpage is what he is looking for, or will he create a new interpage? It is clear that Finding the Interwiki page is easy as it has been said above is totally inaccurate, and I believe that this issue may be the most hindering issue of this proposal.
  • Providing that he found the interpage, the editor has to add one link on the Wikipedia article and another on the interpage. Double the work!
• What I'm proposing:
  • Keep it simple and local: all that the Portuguese editor has to do is add an interlanguage link pointing to a familiar language ([[id:Same]]) or a template ({{interlanguage|id|Same}}).
  • A bot picks up the link (which would be easier if we used a template), then:
    • If pt:Same is not yet part of an interpage (ie. does not have any interlanguage link):
      • If id:Same is already part of an interpage, add pt:Same to the same interpage.
      • If id:Same can't be found, create a new interpage and add the two links (id & pt) to it.
    • If pt:Same is already part of an interpage (ie. does have interlanguage links):
      • If id:Same is already part of an interpage, the bot will detect a "two-islands" situation (see below).
      • If id:Same can't be found, create a new interpage and add the two links (id & pt) to it.
  • Replace the interlanguage link or template in the Portuguese article with {{#interlanguage:article number}}

Questions

• Advantage
  • My proposal makes the managing of interlanguage links directly from the Wikipedia page (which could be in any language) instead of the interlanguage wiki which interface and language may be unfamiliar. However, many other tasks will be centralized in this wiki, as I'll mention later.
• After all what would the interpage title be?
  • My proposal makes the interpage's title irrelevant, since the search for interpages is done by a bot, and relies on the interlanguage links in the interpages and not on its title. For uniformity, I suggest we use numbers.
• Two-Islands situation (two interpages about the same subject appeared):
  • How can they be detected?
    • If an editor adds to an article which already belongs to interpage X an interlanguage link to its translation which turns out to be on interpage Y.
    • Example: Suppose that fr:France links to interpage 100 (which includes French, English and Italian), and its translation in Japanese jp:フランス links to interpage 200 (which includes Japanese, Korean and Chinese). An editor wants to add an interlanguage link pointing to the Japanese article (which is obviously missing from the French article), the bot will search for jp:フランス and find that it belongs to interpage 200.
  • What should be done?
    • Merge the two interpages. At the end there will be one interpage (100 or 200) with the following languages: French, English, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese).
• Sorting order
  • I agree that the problem of sorting order pointed out by Amir is important. I believe it should be provided by the extension to create a customizable language order.

About the interlanguage wiki

• In what language will it be?
  • Since I believe my proposal will diminish the interaction of users with the interlanguage wiki, this issue will be of less importance. Evidently it should be written in as many languages as users are able to provide, especially that I expect only a small number of policy and help pages. (About how multiple languages will be implemented and handled in a single wiki, I suggest we consult the Commons and Meta-Wiki which have similar issue)
• What tasks will be done there
  • Since its fundamental goal, managing interlanguage links, will be mostly automatic, what's left would be detecting deleted pages, page moves and redirects (which I believe can be mostly done by bots). The part where discussion will be needed is with interlanguage conflicts. That's why I suggest that Interwiki synchronization to be moved to the new wiki. The wiki will certainly include a presentation page, and FAQ, and few guidelines. Other parts of the wiki would be devoted for discussing and philosophizing on an improved system.

I hope that I was clear with presenting my ideas (I admit my English is week). I also admit, that you will point out to many flaws in my proposal, so I'm open for any remark and ideas. Finally I also have some thoughts about how the first huge task of opening the wiki and moving the already million interlanguage links there, while minimizing conflicts and problems. I'll add them later. Thank you. Eklipse 19:56, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Your English is at least as good as mine, and your proposals are very good, too. --Amir E. Aharoni 20:35, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I am glad you are trying to help, but I find your proposal to be very complex and not quite clear to me.

What we are doing right now is:

1. If someone is translating an article, copy/paste interlanguage links from the article that is being translated;
2. If someone is writing an article anew, find an article on the same topic in a familiar language and copy/paste interlanguage links from there;
   • if there are no links, create a new one in your article;
   • if there is no such article, do nothing.

Note that in both cases, interlanguage links will contain a number of languages that the user does not understand, and that was not causing us major problems so far.

With the extension, what we will do:

1. If someone is translating an article, copy/paste the interlanguage extension link from the article that is being translated;
2. If someone is writing an article anew, find an article on the same topic in a familiar language and copy/paste the interlanguage extension link from there; and if there is no such article, do nothing;
   • if there are no links, you can:
     • create a new interlanguage link in your article and wait for a bot to pick it up and make the page in the interlanguage wiki;
     • or, create the new interlanguage extension link in your article and then follow it and make the page in the interlanguage wiki;
   • if there is no such article, do nothing.

I believe that the procedure is not more complex than the one we are using right now. Nikola 19:30, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for answer. I was going to respond, but before that I want to ask if an extension is automatically implemented in all wikipedias, or each wikipedia has the freedom of accepting or rejecting it? Eklipse 06:57, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

I think the propsal for using bots is OK, but I think we should not rely on bots, as in general bots takes time (days, weeks) to 'fix' the links. I therfore propose to use bots only as assistance for people that are not familiar with the interlanguage wiki. One conclusion of using bots is that naming is not important (it could be numbers) is therfore no longer valid. HenkvD 12:53, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

It will probably be enabled on all Wikipedias, but a community could decide not to use it. Nikola 20:30, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

You could also implement a blacklist for a given wiki, or a way for a local wiki to say 'dion't use the global list, use this one'. That would make this particularly non-conflicting with existing practice. -- sj | help translate |+

Essai

Bonjour,

Après lecture de la page très intéressante, j'ai fait un essai, me fiant à ceci (« On the projects, the Interlanguage Extension is installed. Interlanguage links could now be added by writing {{#interlanguage:article name}}, which will fetch all the interlanguage links from the central wiki page "article name". »). À ma connaissance, seule la ca.Wikipedia possède un article sur le prince Philetaerus de Pergame. J'ai donc inséré l'instruction « {{#interlanguage:Philetaerus III of Pergamum}} » (en choisissant un titre anglais pour l'article « central » ; je crois qu'il est raisonnable de choisir un titre le plus international possible, plutôt que celui du premier article comme dit dans la page : « Article names on the central wiki will probably typically be names of the articles in the language in which the first article on the subject was written. »… Et pourtant, Dieu sait combien je n'aime pas l'anglais !). Résultat ? Rien. Alors ? Is the the Interlanguage Extension installed in the ca;Wikipedia, or not ?

Yours,

--Budelberger 17:40, 3 November 2008 (UTC) (). (En réalité, j'ai fait aussi ça et ça… Si vous consultez les articles liés par interwiki – Estratonice‎, Στρατονίκη, Stratonice, Stratonice ; trois pages d'homonymie (ca, el, en) et une page globale (fr) –, on comprend tout de suite l'intérêt d'un interwiki central !)

Non, je crois que l'extension n'est installee sur aucun Wiki. Mais tu peux utiliser [testwiki.smolenski.rs] pour tes test. Eklipse 05:11, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Oui, merci, j'avais bien compris ; dommage que ça ne fonctionne pas encore, parce que toutes ces modifications faites par des robots (souvent à tort !) me donnent le tournis. Non, pas besoin de faire des tests ; j'ai vu que les tests de Nikola Smolenski fonctionnaient très bien ; pas la peine d'en ajouter. À ton avis, est-ce que je dois continuer à inclure l'instruction « {{#interlanguage:}} » dans les pages uniques (la ca.Wikipedia en est très riche) que je modifie, ou c'est vraiment trop prématuré ? --Budelberger 12:30, 8 November 2008 (UTC) (). (P.-S. : J'écris en français, mais on peut me répondre en étranger…)

J'ai vu l'article ca:Filèter (príncep), mais je ne vois pa la raison pourquoi tu fais ces ajouts. L'extension est encore loin d'etre aboutie et beaucoup de choses doivent etre decidees avant. En tout cas l'extension ne marche pas actuellement. Si tu connais l'anglai je te propose de lire les discussions avant et si tu as une idee pour faire marcher ce projet (car il en a vraiment besoin), ta proposition sera precieuse. Merci. Eklipse 05:29, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Moi, j'avais compris que ça marchait déjà ; c'est donc prématuré. La seule difficulté de ce projet, c'est évidemment le choix du premier nom mis en interwiki. Si c'est comme je l'ai fait dans mes essais l'anglais, pourquoi donner à l'anglais la primauté ? Si c'est dans la langue du premier article comme proposé initialement, ça sera difficilement compréhensible par beaucoup : même le catalan peut être difficile à comprendre ; alors le chinois, le turc, etc. ! --Budelberger 15:30, 9 November 2008 (UTC) (). (J'ai une idée pour mettre en place cette nouvelle fonctionnalité sans en avoir l'air. Je vais essayer ; et j'espère que les illiterated de toutes les Wikipedia ne saboteront pas cet essai (comme ils le font tous avec tout ce qu'ils ne comprennent pas, c'est-à-dire beaucoup de choses) ; je reviendrai te dire.)

Voilà, c'est fait. Examinez Histaspes (desambiguación) et Histaspes (fill de Darios I), le template NiW, la category NiW : je devrais – j'espère ! – être prêt pour le changement ! Je pourrais faire la même chose avec es.Wikipedia (Histaspes (hijo de Jerjes I), i. e. « Hystaspes, 4 » comme « nom universel »), mais malheureusement, là-bas, règnent de dangereux intellectuels très bas du front ; des spécialistes des manga. --Budelberger 17:48, 9 November 2008 (UTC) ().

New version

I have just released new version of the extension, having in mind some of the comments given here. Nikola 16:02, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

not yet created articles

I think this idea of a "translation hub" is very enlightening. It can be extended to links to articles that haven't been created in some Wikipedias. For example, as I know, the German and Japanese Wikipedia are way ahead of the English Wikipedia in some aspects of chemistry. Lots of articles do not have interwiki links. If the equivalent article in English (which will be created in the English Wikipedia eventually) is linked to the existing, say, German article, it would be much better to search for other existing articles that contain similar content. It would also save the time checking regularly if the English version of some article exists, because editors on English Wikipedia wouldn't usually search for interwiki links. An example of my idea would be: de:Xanthoprotein-Reaktion - ja:キサントプロテイン反応 - zh:蛋白黄反应 - (en:Xanthoprotein reaction). --Choij 12:37, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

If I understand you well, you want to put interwiki link to articles that do not exist, when you can guess what their names will be. In principle, that could be done, but it is a separate issue from this extension (it could work with and without it). Nikola 22:09, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Some problems

What about some issues connected with inter-language linking of articles:

• Will it be allowed to link articles and disambigs? My opinion is: they should be linked if they have the same scope of concept. Example: disambig ru:Борьба на летних Олимпийских играх 1992 is about 2 kinds of wrestling like en:Wrestling at the 1992 Summer Olympics.
• Is it possible to link section of article in one language with whole article in other? Example is nearly the same: ru:Вольная борьба на летних Олимпийских играх 1992 is about en:Wrestling at the 1992 Summer Olympics#Freestyle.

Infovarius 19:55, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Link articles and disambigs - why not? It is now.

Link article to a section - interesting idea. But again, it could be done with and without the extension. Nikola 22:10, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Some participants against from linking articles and disambigs. Actually I have to fight against some bots because py-wikipedia includes such segregation... Infovarius 13:43, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Topics should link to the same topic in other languages. I will give you an example of the problems created by users behaving like what you describe. For instance the Norwegian article about ice cream, no:Iskrem, naturally links to the Swedish article about ice cream, sv:Glass. The Norwegian article about glass, no:Glass links to the Swedish page about glass, sv:Glas. Now, the Norwegian page no:Glass is a disambiguation page. It is not about glass. Neither is it about ice cream. It is about the word starting with "Gla" and ending with "ss". The meaning(s) of that word is largely irrelevant when considering interwiki for a disambig page. This disambiguation page should interwiki-link to other pages with the same name (not the same topic because disambiguation pages aren't about topics, they're about names). If the Swedes had one disambiguation page for the word "glass" and one for the word "glas", which one should the Norwegian disambiguation page point to? Please consider this question before making a mess out of the interwiki links. - Soulkeeper 01:52, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree that disambigs about names should not be linked to articles with the same name. But there are disambigs about topics and they should be linked to articles with the same topic. One example is in the beginning of the post. The other is en:Theory of relativity (which is article) and tr:Görelilik kuramı. Infovarius 23:40, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Disambiguation pages are technical pages to collect articles with the same name. They are not articles. Nobody will interwikilink articles with categories or images. Why should we link them with disambiguation pages? Linking disambigs with articles will only cause interwikiconflicts. --Obersachse 22:21, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Alas, some disambiguation pages are partly articles, when little is known about an entry. See e. g. Alcyone (disambiguation), 6 links for disambiguation AND two entries, « Cleopatra Alcyone » and « Alcyone, the pseudonymous author »… Its iwies are true disambiguation pages, except the Portuguese (« Alcione é um prenome que… ») and Russian (« Алкиона — мать Элефенора ») – and perhaps Japanese (« アルシオーネはCLAMP…) – one. I have other examples, which I met in my (numerous) iwies. --Budelberger 16:03, 18 January 2009 (UTC) ().

« Cleopatra Alcyone » and « Alcyone, the pseudonymous author » are just disambiguation page entries without links to own articles. Alcyone (disambiguation) should be regarded as a disambiguation page. --::Slomox:: >< 22:30, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Should be but is not. --Budelberger 02:17, 20 January 2009 (UTC) ().

In ShelfSkewed's opinion too… --Budelberger 15:42, 20 January 2009 (UTC) ().

At the end of the day, I guess it should be decided on a case-to-case basis. For example, en:Sopot (disambiguation) and fr:Sopot (homonymie) most certainly should be linked together, while there may be some disambiguation pages that shouldn't. Nikola 18:55, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Linking disambiguation pages is not a problem, I do it every day ; there is a problem when disambiguation pages are not (true) disambiguation pages !… --Budelberger 20:27, 20 January 2009 (UTC) ().

I agree it should be case-to-case. -- sj | help translate |+ 22:02, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

What about data dumps?

If we use that extension, what will happen to the interwiki links in the data dumps? will they still be available?--Alnokta 05:16, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

You mean "langlinks.sql.gz"? I guess there will be one file for links defined at the local wiki and one for the central wiki. To have the full list both files have to be combined. --::Slomox:: >< 11:09, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Even that would not be necessary :) Nikola 17:19, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, they will still be available, as if the interwikis are local. Nikola 17:19, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Good. Thanks.--Alnokta 09:12, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Watchlist

I'd love to see this extension in Wikipedia, but here's a problem that i just noticed: Changing the contents of the links page in the common interwiki does not appear in the watchlist.

So, suppose there's a page called [[Computer]] in en.wiki. It has {{interlanguage:Ordinador}} on it. The page [[Ordinador]] has the links:

• en:Computer
• ca:Ordinador
• he:מחשב

Then someone changes he:מחשב to he:פיל, and this is vandalism, because מחשב means "computer" and פיל means "elephant".

(Come to think of it, the same problem exists for Commons: someone can upload a picture of an elephant instead of Computer.jpg and it will propagate to all wikis.)

It's not the highest priority, but it should be addressed somehow. --Amir E. Aharoni 18:47, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Just as Commons has a community, the central interwiki repository will have a community too, that looks for vandalism, resolves conflicts etc. In my opinion, it would be the best way, to start the project, look at the dynamics and then decide whether further steps need to be taken to assure the accuracy. If quite sure, that the wiki will quickly evolve a community and useful measures to assure accuracy. --::Slomox:: >< 19:25, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Definitely. This community would be where all of the bot maintainers and owners could hang out, rather thanc reating user pages and talk pages that don't get watched on hudnreds of different wikisl... -- sj | help translate |+

Please vote for the related bug

15607 in bugzilla. --- sj | help translate |+

Central wiki formatting

I've created a straw poll to gauge community sentiment on the formatting of the links in the central wiki:

• A newer look at the interlanguage link/Central wiki style straw poll

-- Tim Starling 23:22, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Dead?

As far as I can tell this project is dead now. Have mörser, will travel 19:35, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi [[Have mörser, I think it is not dead, but it has grown in something more than the original idea: Wikidata implements the idea for a repository for interwiki links (it is the 'central wiki' proposed here) but other things have been added to it. Bever (talk) 05:14, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Even newer: Making inter-language links shorter

Interesting discussion and proposal: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki.i18n/662 It's an even newer look at the interlanguage link now that Wikidata phase I is behind us. ;) Try the prototype at http://pauginer.github.io/prototype-uls/#lisa --Nemo 14:12, 25 April 2013 (UTC)