Talk:Interwiki conflicts

Oww

My brain hurts from reading this. Might be just a tad bit too complicated... any way it could be simplified some? EVula // talk // 04:39, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

It is an enumeration of common cases, isn't it? I dealt many times with it. How you mean it should be simplified: two legs bad, one leg good? ☺ Incnis Mrsi 07:57, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I again see this as a promising first version of a conceptual model of the different types of conflicts, based on the listing (enumeration) in en:Wikipedia:Interwiki linking conflicts. I have only two experiences of trying to solve such conflicts, and when I found this page I had a valuable a-ha experience: "So this is what I was struggling with!" So please let the en:WP page have the listing of example conflicts (even if it is bound to become long) and develop this page towards a concise enough and easily enough understandable typology of the various conflicts. After all, there are few things as practical as a good theory! --Ronja 10:40, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

conceptual equivalent or not?

Another question: should the page on the culture around a particular word or idiom in a particular language, be linked to a page about its equivalent in another language, or not? --Hillgentleman 11:42, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Can someone explain this in plain English, please?

It is hard for me to understand what is being said here. To my knowledgem there are a few cases:

1. the interwiki is one to one: the articles in both languages cover the same.
2. there is an interwiki "shift": the article in the other language covers much of the same, but both articles cover different aspects as well.
3. there is an interwiki "widening": the article in the other language covers a wider subject than the article in the home language.
4. there is an interwiki "narrowing": the article in the other language covers less than the article in the home language.
5. someone has made an interwiki error and both articles are not related.

With articles that have interwiki links to many languages, there is always the risk of one of the effects happening on the way. This can be caused by an initial error, or by changes (merging or splitting) later in any of the articles in another language

ADDITION: I have seen a case where the narrowing in the other language goes so far that there finally are two legitimately different articles on two closely related concepts in the other language but only one of those exists in the home language, and the interwiki link ends up pointing to the wrong article. This is tricky to sort out, when the one or the other article exists on still more wikipedias, and only few wikipedias have both, and many interwiki links "cross over" from one article to the other. --Ronja 18:50, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

The interwiki structure as implemented in MediaWiki has some advantages, but also some disadvantages: one of the things that cannot be handled properly is the "narrowing" case: it is impossible to link from a broader article to an article on a more specific one in another language. On the other hand, it is possible to link to a subpage of an article in the case of widening. So: we can link in one direction, but not in the other for this case. I think the writer addresses this problem.

Other problems are the thousands of bot edits whenever an article changes. People's watchlists are full of bot changes that are no more than interwiki changes. Why wasn't interwiki and other indexing data stored in a different namespace (in the same way as discussion pages exist for each page)? That would make interwiki work easier for bots, too, since they don't have to download the full text, and upload it again.

Another problem is the structure: for n languages, n * (n-1) interwikis have to be made and updated. Another structure would be a central database with a single link from each article in any language to a reference in that database. But that would give a large load on the server, that has to update the references it generates for each page. Combined with a structural change mentioned above, it might be done (but that's my personal opinion).

Quistnix 22:22, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

conceptual issues

There are also issues on the conceptual level. For example, there are pages around a word, or the concept and culture around the word. For example, fuck. It is likely that, in any wikipedia except the English one, there are two candidates which may be linked to en:fuck - the one being about the cultural and historical issues of the English word fuck, the other being about the "equivalent" (or even equivalents) of the word fuck in that language. It is debatable whether one or the other should be the one. Whilst allowing both causes no problems for human editors, it does create problems for bots. But - so what? Bots serve men, not the other way round. --Hillgentleman 22:36, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

IMHO any non-English wikipedia should not contain an article on English word "fuck". The wiktionary should. This example is not good, but somewhere such ambiguity really appears though. Some anglicisms are more used than appropriate translations. Incnis Mrsi 18:53, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

If English wikipedia has an article on the culture and history of the word fuck, any other wikipedia should also. We cannot expect everybody who wants to know the culture behind "fuck" to read English Wikipedia. Wikipedia collect all sorts of knowledge about the world and disseminate them in various languages. Hillgentleman 15:38, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Example

I don't know if it's worth commenting on a 4-year old page with no active discussion, but see w:gunpowder vs. w:de:Schwarzpulver and w:de:Schießpulver. Details at w:Talk:Gunpowder#de wiki link. People should keep mathematical idealism out of natural languages. Have mörser, will travel 19:40, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, this "iron rule" of interwikis seems to be entirely invented by interwiki bot owners. It is ridiculous to expect that interwikis can always be an injective function. Not all language Wlikepias are at the same state of development. It is inevitable that several articles on English could usefully be linked to the same article Farsi. English is much further developed and articles tend to grow and split. The bots should learn to live with it and not try to fight human editors. SpinningSpark 20:50, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Could you maybe point me to an update of the discussion that led to this graph on interwiki arrangement? What is the current practise and where has this been discussed lately? thanks, C.Koltzenburg (talk) 11:48, 3 June 2012 (UTC) -- I just found this essay that dates from 2009. So having an update would really be helpful, thanks C.Koltzenburg (talk) 12:01, 3 June 2012 (UTC)