Proposal talk:Interwiki links for redlinks

+1

Great idea. I sometimes thought, that it would be helpful to offer a possibility to read a nonexistent article in anotheer language, e.g. in English. But in case in more than one other language the requested exists, the software should offer a list of them all, which could be sorted by one of the rankings you proposed. This because an article in a language I don't know doesn't help me at all, even if it's excellent. --Jackson 12:09, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

• Thanks. If this gets implemented at all I'll be thrilled. Joey the Mango 00:56, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

I like this proposal.

For the situation I most often encounter, I agree with Jackson, it really needs to be a list of links to articles on any other language wikipedia. I frequently find a red-link for the English article on a Belgium-related person or place, but there's a useful article to be found on either the French or Dutch wikipedia - or both, or in German, or in another language entirely. Ideally I want to be able to see all the available pages so I can choose which language I prefer.

They'd even be useful when the article is in a language you don't understand at all, at least where you can do machine-translation to get the gist of the text. --David Edgar 14:28, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Agree on the single-language issue.

Russian Wikipedia has templates “не переведено” and “не переведено 2” (which add a link to a specified article in another language in case the link is red, and a highlighted notice that the template should be removed in case the link is blue); and “Перевести” (which creates a banner saying that there is a more complete article in another specified language).

In the latter case there are interwikis available on the same page, but in the former two cases the editor has to choose one article which s/he thinks is the best. There are several issues with that:

• Need to load the foreign page to get to the interwiki links.
• The editor has to choose a single best version. The alternative currently is to add an HTML comment mentioning other links they like; adding several links in the same style will take too much space.
• Another editor who can read other languages than the first one does (or maybe simply has a different opinion), may choose a different article.
• If the “best” article is in Chinese, what is a newbie who doesn’t know of interwikis to do, though the “second‐best” article is in a language familiar to him? The editor might thus choose the English one instead.
• If that article is deleted or renamed without a redirect, there will be two “red” links.

--89.178.219.205 16:03, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

• The way I envision the system, it cannot find anything that does not have the exact same title. Bulgarians might find an article in Russian since they both use Cyrillic, but not the English or Chinese article. Joey the Mango 20:58, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:11, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

• I picture the system as most useful for non-English-speaking end-users, especially in closely related languages. Many of the smaller Wikipedias don't have the profusion of articles of the big Wikipedias, and so searching is an exercise in frustration. Frustrated people go back to Google or other search engines. I hope that my system will have some role in increasing the rate of article creation on all Wikipedias, again by keeping searches in-house, and by concentrating on popular articles. For example, according to http://wikistics.falsikon.de/latest-daily/wikipedia/de/, the article on the recently deceased Horst Stowasser was the 16th most accessed article on the German Wikipedia on 2009-09-01. Only the German and Dutch Wikipedias have an article on him. But the German article was viewed 41,373 times so far this month, plus 7020 times in August. (And 3060 times so far on the Dutch Wikipedia.) Many other such cases can be found. Is that an answer for your question? Joey the Mango 06:54, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Inter-language stub articles

The proposal has two aspects:

• For articles with the same lemma in different languages (e.g. names) the click on the red link could automatically provide references to other languages where the lemma existed.
• For articles whose lemma requires translation the best solution is probably to allow and to generate inter-language stub articles. An automatic process is likely to generate some articles who are not correctly translated, which is why editable stub articles appear to be the sensible solution. --Fasten (Wikinews: Aktion Deutschland Hilft asks for donations after the earthquake in Indonesia) 21:00, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

I like the concept. I've found articles in one language's Wikipedia which were translated from a (now old) version in another language's Wikipedia. Unfortunately, they had the old errors as well, or weren't up to date. What I really want to see in a search is a link to the most extensive (aka longest) article in any language - or list all of them in sequence by size - so I don't waste time clicking on articles which don't have much information. Google Translate works well enough that I'd rather read an in-depth article, translated. (If you want improved translations, encourage editors to write straightforward sentences.) Flatterworld 21:01, 13 March 2011 (UTC)