Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Multimedia and Commons/Make subcategory browsing multilingual using Wikidata

Make subcategory browsing multilingual using Wikidata

  • Problem: Although Commons is a multilingual project, MediaWiki categories can only have a label in one language. Wikidata changes this: when a category is linked to Wikidata (which over 3 million of them now are), you can define labels for it on Wikidata in many languages. The Wikidata Infobox displays those multilingual labels within the category, so you can see the topic info in your language when you are within the category. However, subcategories only appear in the language they were created in (normally English), which can make it difficult for people that don't know that language to browse them.
  • Who would benefit: Commons editors and browsers who do not know English
  • Proposed solution: Use the Commons <-> Wikidata sitelinks to Wikidata to display a category label in the user's requested language. This would be best done within MediaWiki itself rather than having Javascript or similar trying to rewrite the labels after rendering.
  • More comments: A bonus would be if d:Property:P18 (image) could also be used to show subcategory thumbnails, and perhaps also use the descriptions on hover-over to add additional context.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Mike Peel (talk) 20:33, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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