Meta:Babel/Archives/2012-06

Proposal to clean Meta-Wiki namespaces

Currently at Meta-Wiki there are the following namespaces:

'metawiki' => array(
        100 => "Hilfe",           # German
        101 => "Hilfe_Diskussion",
        102 => "Aide",         # French
        103 => "Discussion_Aide",
        104  => "Hjælp",         # Danish
        105  => "Hjælp_diskussion",
        106 => "Helpo",           # Esperanto
        107 => "Helpa_diskuto",
        108 => "Hjälp",          # Swedish
        109 => "Hjälp_diskussion",
        110 => "Ayuda",           # Spanish
        111 => "Ayuda_Discusión",
        112 => "Aiuto",           # Italian
        113 => "Discussioni_aiuto",
        114 => "ヘルプ",       # Japanese
        115 => "ヘルプ‐ノート",
        116 => "NL_Help",         # Dutch
        117 => "Overleg_help",
        118 => "Pomoc",           # Polish
        119 => "Dyskusja_pomocy",
        120 => "Ajuda",           # Portuguese
        121 => "Ajuda_Discussão",
        122 => "CA_Ajuda",        # Valencian
        123 => "CA_Ajuda_Discussió",
        124 => "Hjelp",           # Norsk
        125 => "Hjelp_diskusjon",
        126 => '帮助',      # Chinese
        127 => '帮助 对话',
        128 => 'Помощь',      # Russian
        129 => 'Помощь_Дискуссия',
        130 => 'Pomoč',        # Slovenian
        131 => 'Pogovor_o_pomoči',
        132 => 'مساعدة', # Arabic
        133 => 'نقاش_المساعدة',
        200 => 'Grants',    // per bug #22810
        201 => 'Grants_talk',
        202 => 'Research',  // per bug #28742
        203 => 'Research_talk',
    ),
    // @}

Probably they are there for historical reasons but the ammount of namespaces is overkill and useless. Translations are better handled in subpages and the new translate extension does that way. See for example Hilfe:Bearbeiten; which can be perfectly a subpage of Help:Editing/de. Per the usual practice to subpaginate and the new translate extension I propose to move all the content to subpages and remove the following namespaces:

        100 => "Hilfe",           # German
        101 => "Hilfe_Diskussion",
        102 => "Aide",         # French
        103 => "Discussion_Aide",
        104  => "Hjælp",         # Danish
        105  => "Hjælp_diskussion",
        106 => "Helpo",           # Esperanto
        107 => "Helpa_diskuto",
        108 => "Hjälp",          # Swedish
        109 => "Hjälp_diskussion",
        110 => "Ayuda",           # Spanish
        111 => "Ayuda_Discusión",
        112 => "Aiuto",           # Italian
        113 => "Discussioni_aiuto",
        114 => "ヘルプ",       # Japanese
        115 => "ヘルプ‐ノート",
        116 => "NL_Help",         # Dutch
        117 => "Overleg_help",
        118 => "Pomoc",           # Polish
        119 => "Dyskusja_pomocy",
        120 => "Ajuda",           # Portuguese
        121 => "Ajuda_Discussão",
        122 => "CA_Ajuda",        # Valencian
        123 => "CA_Ajuda_Discussió",
        124 => "Hjelp",           # Norsk
        125 => "Hjelp_diskusjon",
        126 => '帮助',      # Chinese
        127 => '帮助 对话',
        128 => 'Помощь',      # Russian
        129 => 'Помощь_Дискуссия',
        130 => 'Pomoč',        # Slovenian
        131 => 'Pogovor_o_pomoči',
        132 => 'مساعدة', # Arabic
        133 => 'نقاش_المساعدة',

Comments welcome. Regards. —Marco Aurelio (Nihil Prius Fide) 19:37, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Old discussion about namespaces can be found here too. Perhaps creating a Essay: an Historical: namespace would help. Not sure. Regards. —Marco Aurelio (Nihil Prius Fide) 19:43, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

No it would not. I agree that all translations should be moved to the new system and then the old namespaces deleted. It's probably better to discuss this as part of the Meta:Translate extension draft. Nemo 19:45, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Agree with the above, we don't need these unnecessary namespaces due to the new subpages system which makes it a lot easier to fix other language versions of the same page. The Helpful One 20:01, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi. I think some stats would help here. Here are the current page counts by namespace:

Extended content
The number of pages in each namespace; data as of 21:32, 20 March 2012 (UTC). No. ID Name Non-redirects Redirects Total 1 0 (Main) 27258 8939 36197 2 1 Talk 5659 1603 7262 3 2 User 245497 2144 247641 4 3 User talk 596750 886 597636 5 4 Meta 873 409 1282 6 5 Meta talk 165 43 208 7 6 File 3788 43 3831 8 7 File talk 220 3 223 9 8 MediaWiki 47519 28 47547 10 9 MediaWiki talk 434 3 437 11 10 Template 8967 947 9914 12 11 Template talk 719 90 809 13 12 Help 384 217 601 14 13 Help talk 241 33 274 15 14 Category 2943 21 2964 16 15 Category talk 61 1 62 17 100 Hilfe 56 5 61 18 101 Hilfe Diskussion 30 0 30 19 102 Aide 102 12 114 20 103 Discussion Aide 30 1 31 21 104 Hjælp 10 0 10 22 105 Hjælp diskussion 1 0 1 23 108 Hjälp 1 0 1 24 110 Ayuda 6 1 7 25 111 Ayuda Discusión 2 0 2 26 112 Aiuto 59 5 64 27 113 Discussioni aiuto 2 0 2 28 114 ヘルプ 59 15 74 29 115 ヘルプ‐ノート 7 0 7 30 116 NL Help 9 4 13 31 117 Overleg help 2 0 2 32 118 Pomoc 6 0 6 33 119 Dyskusja pomocy 1 0 1 34 120 Ajuda 6 0 6 35 121 Ajuda Discussão 1 0 1 36 122 CA Ajuda 1 0 1 37 124 Hjelp 2 0 2 38 125 Hjelp diskusjon 1 0 1 39 126 帮助 29 0 29 40 128 Помощь 52 30 82 41 129 Помощь Дискуссия 11 1 12 42 130 Pomoč 12 3 15 43 132 مساعدة 17 14 31 44 133 نقاش المساعدة 9 5 14 45 200 Grants 319 36 355 46 201 Grants talk 92 6 98 47 202 Research 378 85 463 48 203 Research talk 113 32 145 Totals 942904 15665 958569

I support removing the old, unused namespaces. They're a(n) historical artifact, as far as I'm concerned.

That said, I don't really like the Translate extension. I'm not sure we should be encouraging people to use that. Separate discussion, though, really. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:39, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Note the namespace typo: "Hjälp diskussion" needs to be renamed into "Hjälpdiskussion". I assume that the Danish and Norwegian ones also need to drop a space. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:41, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Basically I support cleaning them up, we could even delete those pages as well. They are relics of the day before mediawiki.org was created, not only before Translate extension. In those days all MediaWiki document was hosted here. I am however concerning with links from the external sites to those pages. As said, this wiki served once as MediaWiki documentation site, do we need to assure them to (soft) redirect to the current venue? I'm not sure if we assure those soft redirecting after we delete namespaces. If it doesn't affected, it's ok. --Aphaia (talk) 10:45, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Cleaning up templates

So I've been working through these pages with the help of some users and we've noticed that there are a few frankly annoying templates that have a structure with means that with this namespace moving all the links need to be updated manually. So I'm proposing that we replace all of these instances with {{languages}} which is a much nicer template. There are cases though if you look at Template:H-langs:Edit summary where links go off-Meta to other wikis - the best solution for this is to create sub-pages that soft redirect to these pages wherever they maybe - MediaWiki.org or other language Wikipedias. Thoughts? The Helpful One 22:46, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

You can view some of them transcluded at Help:Help page footer templates#Template:H:f. The Helpful One 22:49, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Thehelpfulone and I support this proposal. Fyi, I'm currently helping him to clean up the namespaces. Mathonius (talk) 22:53, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Agreed with Thehelpfulone's proposal. I have also been helping with the maintenance work. -Orashmatash (talk) 19:13, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, yes, just do it already!! PeterSymonds (talk) 19:26, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. Having {{languages}} there's no need for creating a template for each help page, as Template:H-langs:CheckUser. We should delete all of them or make the <languages /> tag to work on pages not exclusively marked for translation. Thanks. —Marco Aurelio (audiencia) 10:06, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Broken links from external sites

I'd like to reiterate a point made by Aphaia in her comment above regarding links from external sites.

The localised help pages have been renamed as discussed. (Thanks to The Helpful One and anyone else cooperated with this.) However, it has left some hundreds of interwiki links broken on different language editions of Wikimedia projects (see [1] and a link around the top of w:fr:Aide:Préférences, for example). I imagine some non-Wikimedia web sites now have similar broken links. As a slogan says, it's desirable to keep links working as long as possible. How do we want to fix this?

A simple solution might be to create soft redirects from the old page names to the new names. Hopefully it wouldn't be a much trouble if we have or can create a list of the old and new names of the pages. When the content is transferred to mediawiki.org or anywhere else, the soft redirects can be updated to the new destinations.

Any thoughts? --whym (talk) 23:33, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi. Sorry, I forgot about this - my intention was to restore all the redirects that I deleted, but it seems as the namespaces themselves have been deleted this isn't quite as easy, I'll ask a developer tomorrow about it, although people in the know are at the Berlin Hackathon this weekend so it might take a bit of time to get an answer. The Helpful One 23:36, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I can wait :) In the meantime we started manually fixing some of the most visible links at jawiki. I believe it shouldn't cause any conflict with your plan. --whym (talk) 05:45, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Excuse me

May I be admin? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Irondevilkitty (talk) 2012-06-04T13:49:01 (UTC)

Adminship can be requested at Meta:Requests for adminship. That said, one of the requirements for becoming an administrator here is that you already are an administrator on some other Wikimedia project. sulutil:Irondevilkitty suggests that you currently aren't an administrator on any other project. Besides, your block on English Wikipedia may affect your chances to become an administrator here. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:04, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

What's more, this account is a sockpuppet. Sockpuppets never get any form of permissions on any WMF wiki.--Jasper Deng (talk) 22:01, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

See: /Greetings at User talk:Nihonjoe (new section)

From the Desk of Orschstaffer Please feel free to Help:
GlobalWikiImprove School Ambassador Project, School Projects, School Assignment, The Humanities, Free Content, (others, many others)Orschstaffer (talk) 03:41, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Teahouse collaboration

The School Project Orsch would like to cordially invite you to Improve Wikipedia.

See me at the Teahouse. I see you at the Tea house

References

Can this be packaged here Template:TemplateWise

No Copyright, icon, Free Content, and other CatchPhrase words

References

The _{icon pictures} WikiMedia could you relate some teaching experience here to help put some class related material in to give us a
real meaningful learning experience?

References

Orschstaffer (talk) 03:53, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Indented responses Orschstaffer (talk) 03:59, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

gallery|images|thumb

وا زبون لرینه به ویکیپدیا اضافه کونیم اشالا

Orschstaffer (talk) 17:17, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Mission Statement

Can someone tell me the essence of Wikimedia Foundation's mission statement. Our main goal is to build a free encyclopaedia (including others), but are we here to preserve the languages? A user asked me a very interesting question that "if Wikipedia is not for preserving languages then why there are 275 odd different languages Wikipedia projects?" I remember a quote of Jimmy on this but not sure about the original text.--Bill william compton (talk) 09:14, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

w:en:Wikipedia#Language_editions: «Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."» Nemo 10:44, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your prompt response to my question. But still the question of "language preservation" remains the same. Actually, the question I'm talking about was asked by a user on Hindi Wikipedia. Hindi Wikipedia has a very complex problem of using two different numeral systems: Devanagari and Arabic numerals. Majority of native Hindi population understand and use only Arabic numerals, but some orthodox users think that as Wikipedia is for preserving language, so we should only use Devanagari numerals. More information is here. So, could you please tell me that whether or not Wikipedia has responsibility to preserve languages?--Bill william compton (talk) 11:10, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Officially not. Nemo 11:19, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Indexing

The archives of Talk:Spam blacklist should probably be noindexed? [2] The main talk page has a noindex tag, but apparently it's not applied to archive pages, at least not systematically. Not all domains discussed on the page are spam sites, and not all of them deserve getting "spam blacklist" results on Google. Shouldn't talk pages be noindexed by default anyway? Jafeluv (talk) 13:36, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, I imagine all the talk namespaces could be marked noindex here. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:36, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

On Meta talk pages are one of the main scopes of the wiki, even more than the "content" pages quite often, so it makes no sense to exclude them all from search. Pages such as the spam blacklist talks are often noindex on all wikis, so it makes sense to add a rule to the wiki robots.txt. --Nemo 10:55, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Really? Which talk pages do you think are a central part of Meta-Wiki? I couldn't think of (m)any, but maybe I'm missing obvious cases. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:16, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

All the Talk: pages as a whole. DocumentMode is a recent thing, so they're as important as the associated main namespace in a wiki like this. --Nemo 06:21, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

I've added an entry at Robots.txt page [3] - added the archives and restored the noindexing of the main spam blacklist page. Feel free to fix any syntax mistake I could have made. Regards. — MA (audiencia) 14:38, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Nemo: Can you give a few specific examples of Meta-Wiki talk pages that you feel should be indexed by search engines? We're not talking about deleting these pages, we're talking about marking them for removal from external search engine indices. I'd be curious to see what specific pages in the talk namespaces (any of them) you feel need to be included in search engine results. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:41, 28 June 2012 (UTC)