Help talk:Interlanguage links

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[edit] Translator Section

I wanted to post this point somewhere, so I opted for it to go here.
What I was thinking is that a "Translate This Page Button" might be an idea. For those people (like me) who like to be able to view the original for reference, what happens is that the original page hops up in a box next to a edit box. It would be useful for reference, plus, currently, I have no idea how to post translations.
You see, I am a German student, and translating wikipedia pages/tubs would be great for exam practice, as well as expanding the German wikipedia. But, I can't post them, because there is no clear link. Any assistance in this matter would be appreciated.
--Scalene 10:15, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
Edit:
Also, maybe a help page for people who want to translate one language into another could be an idea. I can't seem to find one.

[edit] ...

I would like to suggest the upgrading of all wikis to standard unicode, that way you won't have the issue (in any language) of the limitations of Latin-1 when linking to languages in other scripts. Is this possible? I also concur with the linkbot idea presented by Gutza below. Nick 10:09, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think it's very unfortunate that wikipedians have to track changes in 'other languages' for all their articles, instead of the software doing it.

Here, take this example: I work for the Romanian Wikipedia. Say I write article "Mars". I link my Romanian version from the English version, and I link all other versions I find in the English version in my Romanian article (namely da, de, fr, nl and sv at the time of this writing). But what if, at some time in the future, the Japanese article gets written? It gets linked from the main, English Wikipedia, and my Romanian version also gets linked in the Japanese version, but unless someone checks my Romanian version for consisteny, it will never link the Japanese version directly.

I think an interwiki link harvester and synchronizer should be created; the way it would work would be really trivial: it should check if the current (localized) version of an article links to its English counterpart at save time. If it does, then all the translations linked in the English version should be linked here, and this article should be linked as a translation of the English article. And run the same algorithm for all the other translations linked in the English version (in order to add the translation being saved, in case it wasn't already). That way wikipedians wouldn't have to check their links for consistency, they wouldn't need to care about reverse linking (the English article would link to the translated article automagically) and nobody would have to care about spelling mistakes, tag positioning, alphabetical ordering and so on. All the translation author would have to do would be to make sure he links to the correct English article, that's all. --Gutza 16:02 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't think any english bias is necessary, if de: points to ja:, but ja: doesn't point to de:, the software should add that link. Simple. Nick

How do we make an interlanguage link in the body of the article? How do we make a link to an image in another language? There doesn't need to be more than one copy of the cheetah picture, but it was copied to the French Wikipedia because interlanguage picture links don't work. -phma

currently, it seems the only wikipedias we can make a direct link to are the meta (with m) and the english (with w). For the others, we must put the full link. I find that *very* unfortunate, and I hope it will be worked out in time, for it makes body linking pretty hard.

As for images, you are right there seems to be no need to have as many copies as they are languages, but I wonder if it might not be sensible to have different places for copyright issues. --anthere

Should we add this tip?:

  • Only create interlanguage links to foreign language articles that actually exist. It is not helpful to users to be treated to a blank page.

I thought I read about this policy/suggestion somewhere else at some point, and if its desired then I'm pretty sure it belongs in here. If not, then we need a way to make the link colour red as per normal not-yet-an-article wikilinks, Aldie 14:38 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

It was discussed in the mailing list the possible convenience that interlanguage links be put at the end of the article instead of the begining, to reduce the schock to first-time editors. I tried to do it in some articles but it was reverted because "most pages have interlanguage links at the begining". If there was a consensus (I really do not remember), that shoud be put in this meta page.

Ideally, interlangage links should be separated from the content of the article. In another window. user:anthere
Exactely my point also. -- Looxix 18:24, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Hey, Pali links aren't working as far as I can tell (that's pi:dhamma for example .. ), as per dharma. Can anyone help? -- prat

Oh, I removed it. See the older version at Revision as of 16:24 May 12, 2003. --Menchi 23:29 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] English to Japanese and Chinese interlanguage link bug

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Thursday, June 12th, 02003.

Sorry if this problem has been known. Interlanguage links (at the top of the page) from English Wikipedia to Japanese and Chinese Wikipedia don't work. But the links from Japanese and Chinese Wikipedia work just fine. Some people on Chinese Wikipedia experience the same. --Lorenzarius 12:15 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hmm, they work fine in Mozilla 1.1 for Linux, Mozilla 1.3 for Windows, and Internet Explorer 4.0 for Windows. What browser are you using, and what happens when you try to link to one of them? -- Wapcaplet 12:23 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I am using IE6 and Mozilla 1.2.1 and the problem exists in both browser.
The problem is the links point to the wrong places. For example, when I click on the link to Japanese (Nihongo) village pump, it brings me here which is not the page I wanted. --Lorenzarius 12:55 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Ah! Sorry, I do not read Chinese (and am very poor at Japanese) so I didn't notice that they went to the wrong place. Does it do this with all articles? Maybe the inter-language links at the top of the article(s) are incorrect (that is, the unicode stuff inserted into the article). I'm afraid I don't know what to tell you... -- Wapcaplet 13:36 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Seems to have been a side effect of banning chars 0x80-0x9f in titles; these are illegal in ISO 8859-1 charset used here on the English wiki, but it was also stripping them from interlanguage links, which need to be in UTF-8, which does use those bytes. I've temporarily disabled the check so the links should work again. --Brion 16:48 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Can we change "Sort interlanguage links alphabetically!" to something describing that it should be alphabetical by the displayed language name, not the 2-letter language code, e.g.: [[es:23 de junio]][[eo:23-a de junio]] resulting in "Español | Esperanto", instead of [[eo:23-a de junio]][[es:23 de junio]] resulting in "Esperanto | Español"? - Jeandré, 2003-06-28t19:54z

hello Jeanandré, this is a feature that have been implemented in the lastest version. Feel free to submit your language interwikis order on sourceforge feature request or write it on my french talkpage [1] and I will follow up Hashar 07:24, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I think this should be done. According to the Finnish version of this page and the comment I'm replying to, the Finnish language ("suomi" in Finnish) should go in between Serbian and Swedish, not in between Persian and French. I've seen it in the wrong place on many pages (including the ones I recently added it on X-) ).
The Finnish version claims the correct order of languages is:
ab, aa, af, am, ar, an, as, ast, gn, ay, az, id, jv, ms, su, ban, bal, bn, ba, be, mr, bh, bi, bo, bs, br, bug, bg, ca, cs, ch, che, sn, co, za, cy, da, de, di, dz, et, el, en, als, es, eo, eu, fa, fo, fr, fy, ga, gv, sm, gd, gl, gay, gu, ko, ha, hy, hi, hr, iba, ia, iu, ik, xh, zu, is, it, he, kl, kn, ka, ks, kaw, kk, rw, ky, rn, sw, ku, la, ls, lv, lt, li, ln, mad, hu, mak, mk, ml, mg, mt, mi, min, mo, mn, my, nah, na, fj, ng, nl, ne, ja, no, nn, oc, or, om, ug, pa, ps, km, lo, nds, pl, pt, ro, rm, qu, ru, sa, sg, st, tn, sq, si, simple, sd, ss, sk, sl, sr, sh, fi, sv, tl, ta, tt, te, th, ti, vi, tg, tpi, to, tr, tk, tw, ur, uk, uz, vo, wa, wo, ts, yi, yo, zh, zh-tw, zh-cn
Lakefall 17:07, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Is it just me, or is Hebrew (he) missing from the list? Also, this approach can be problematic when adding links to the (say) Hebrew articles from other languages wikis, as the order is diffrent for each language/alpabet, and impossible to keep track of if you don't know the language. 217.132.173.6 13:00, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Language order poll for suggestions to change the order. Angela. 05:55, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

From User talk:The Anome 6 September

I think the foot of the page might be better for the category link, as it's less confusion in the source text for the novice editor. You're right, we should start tagging them now before the category system goes live -- it's just the problem with the "?" links that needs fixing somehow. (I'm personally not convinced of the whole category system... but I may change my mind once it's in place :) -- Tarquin 19:09, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I disagree. They should be consistent with interlanguage links and the guidelines for these state that "at the top is conventional". Angela 19:17, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Languages links also should go at the bottom; the initial convention of putting them at the top is deprecated, as it floods the edit box. --Brion 19:28, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Since when? None of the guidelines seem to say this, although Wikipedia:Interlanguage links says that "some recommend putting the language links at the bottom", it doesn't say that putting them at the top is deprecated. Of the 1000s of pages I've looked at, I've only once seen the links at the bottom. It's being done this way across all Wikipedias. If I start trying to change now it is going to cause problems as people will come along and continue to add them to the top, not knowing that there are some at the bottom and they turn out all unalphabetical. Angela 19:42, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Since 3 February, 2003. Perhaps my wording was not strong enough. :) It's not a serious issue, of course, as the placement of the links in the source text matters not one whit to the look of the page. They just get very, very unwieldy at the top as the number of links grows. Move them to the bottom when you notice some at the top, if you like. Or don't. It's a free wiki. --Brion 19:55, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I don't want to argue with you but the way I was looking at it was that it does make a difference to the look of the page because not everyone knows about the rule so some people will add them at the top and some at the bottom and they end up being out of order. There's also the issue of trying to change the procedure on en: and the other languages not knowing about it. As so many of the pages already do it in this way, perhaps it would be easier to address the issues rather than change anything;

it's confusing for newbie editors

Solution: Explain it in the how to edit page.

the links often show up in search results

Not convinced this is a problem as I have never seen this happen. For example a search for Uighur in either Wikipedia's search or in Google shows the title and then jumps to the first mention of the word, so the IL links are not visible.

Angela 20:30, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Try a search for a name or other word that's the same in most languages to see that problem. --Brion 21:02, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Thank you for the example. Point taken, although interestingly Google still doesn't show them with this example. Angela
This a bug reported by some french people :-) Anthère

My preference is to have the Interlanguage links at the bottom of the page, especially since people started placing each link on a separate line, filling the edit box for some articles with just that. -- User:Docu

When the first interlanguage links where created I placed them at the bottom, but after realizing that others put them at the top I did so, too. I wish I had started a discussion then. Anyway, they should be placed at the bottom, and if we don't get a meta:-namespace in the next months we should start a big campain and recommend the new position to everyone. Or/and someone should write a bot to take care of the repositioning. --Kurt Jansson 21:56, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Is it enough of an issue to start a "big campaign" though? If this is going to happen, it is probably best to do it before the other languages get the new software as there is going to be a lot of IL-linking occuring once that happens. Angela 22:22, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Since you asked Angela, french do put them at the top afaik. I think (but am not entirely sure) that many IL are done with a bot. It is conceivable that a bot also put all the top links at the bottom. I'll drop a word at our pump;Anthère
Humm, the bot put them at top, only because almost all of them where already put there. And the biigest part of this job is not done by the bot (there is only doing this I think) but by all the others contributors included the ones from others wiki (de:, nl:, pl:, sv:, ...). -- Looxix 17:59, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)
And why this is not discuted on intlwiki-l, where it will probably reach more people involved with the interlanguageslinks. -- Looxix 18:02, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Good point perhaps it should be but I don't like posting to the mailing lists. Is there any chance you could do this please Looxix? Angela 18:06, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)
I think it is important. I am sure that many first time visitors clicked on the "edit this page"-button and saw a list of interlanguage links and/or html code for tables/image placement. They thought this would only be a nerd thing, clicked on the "back" button and never tried to edit a page again. And soon there will also be categories ... --Kurt Jansson 19:28, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)

Discussions on the placement of interlanguage links at Le Bistro (the French Village Pump):

[edit] RobBot on fr: and interwiki missing on en:

Hello,

I ran the RobBot on the french wikipedia for the last 4 days. It generated logs for a lot of interwiki missing on all wikipedia. I am wondering if someone on en: might please use the data to update the en: wikipedia ? Maybe you already know people able to take care of this on other wikipedia ?

The logs are available at:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:LinksFR.20031109.zip

Hashar 23:37, 9 Nov 2003 (UTC)

This sounds like something many people (including myself) would be interested in helping with. But I think some better explanation is needed for this to happen.
I've downloaded the ZIP file from the above link, and extracted the 39 logs it contains, and I'm a little the wiser. It seems that these show missing links between various language Wikipedias, for example logs.en.txt shows links missing from the English Wikipedia to the French.
I'm already worked out that there is a standard software-supported way of linking to articles in other Wikipedias, but I don't know where this is documented.
I'm guessing that these logs are not reliable enough to generate these links automatically, and that what is therefore needed is someone with knowledge of both languages to verify each, and then create the missing link(s). This sounds like something that software tools could help with, for example showing both articles in some sort of split screen and providing a button to approve the links. I don't know whether any such tools already exist, or what the basis is for compiling these lists, ie what does an entry actually mean? Knowing this would help me a great deal.
For the links in logs.en.txt my French is probably up to the job, if my guesses are correct.
But could someone check my understanding above, or perhaps provide a better explanation, or even wikify some of the text to point to existing explanations? TIA.
Perhaps we should also come up with a way of dividing the log between those interested. It could be quite time-consuming, and frustrating if it turns out that large numbers of the links have been created since the list was compiled. Andrewa 19:17, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)
The software that produced this, and can be used for automated link-adding, can be found at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/pywikipediabot/pywikipedia/.
The list has been created by going through the French Wikipedia, checking language links, language links from those, etcetera, and when no problem occurred (a problem being two pages from the same language, or an fr: link to a page that does not exist), all pages found that way were added to fr:, and any other lacking links between these pages were written on the log. So for example: "WARNING:en:[[.NET Messenger Service]]does not link to[[fr:MSN Messenger]]" means that the French page links to the English, but there is no link back, "WARNING:en:[[Émile Zola]]does not link to[[da:Emile Zola]]" means that there is a French page that links to both pages, but the English page does not link to the Danish one, and "WARNING:en:[[Émile Zola]]does not link to[[fr:Émile Zola]]but to[[fr:Emile Zola]]" means that the English page links to "Emile Zola" on fr:, but "Emile Zola" either does not exist or is a redirect page, while "Émile Zola" on fr: links to the English page. If wanted, the entries can be added automated or semi-automated. Andre Engels 14:22, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thanks Andre Engels, you are way better than me when it comes to explaining things :p Hashar 15:32, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)

It would be very important expand wikipedia interlanguage links to wikimedia interlanguage links ( for example, use the same interlanguage link structure in another wikimedia piece, like wiktionary).

Don't you mean Wikimedia project? Wikimedia piece is really not good English. — Alex756 22:53, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Interwiki links to right-to-left languages

I am not quite sure whether this is the right place to put this issue, but there is a problem in articles that have an Interwiki link to articles in Arabian wikipedia. Obviously because Arabian is a right-to-left language, the Interwiki link is placed at the very far right end of the Opera browser page (not in IE or Mozilla), producing a very wide scrollbar at the bottom of the page. cf. articles like Biology or September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks. Has anybody an idea how to fix the problem? - WN 02:08, 11 Jan 2004 (CET)

Okay, just found the matter is already discussed on Opera Arabic bug. Never mind! - WN 217.234.1.59 15:08, 14 Jan 2004 (UTC)

[edit] hreflang

I wonder whether it would help anybody if the anchor tags generated by interlanguage links had the hreflang attribute set (spec), e.g. [[cy:Cymraeg]] becomes <a href="http://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymraeg" class="external" title="cy:Cymraeg" hreflang="cy">Cymraeg</a>. But I'm not sure whether anyone really uses hreflang (though Mozilla understands it and shows it in the properties dialogue). Marnanel 04:33, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think that would be useful. I've submitted it as a feature request at Sourceforge. Angela. 20:53, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Balgarski not (Bülgarski)

68.167.249.57 20:45, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC): Based on a comment by Borislav (Talk:Current events#Bulgarian) which is confirmed by this UN page, there's a bug in the Other languages link generated for bg which should be easy to fix. If you take a look at Solar system or Current events or any other page with a Bulgarian version, the link in Other languages is rendered into the Roman/Latin alphabet incorrectly, as Bülgarski. As Borislav and the UN point out, it should be Balgarski. If this is the incorrect page to make this request, please suggest a better place.

This is already at SourceForge. Angela. 22:27, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)
68.167.249.57 00:48, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC): Thanks. I cross-referenced this in Talk:Current events#Bulgarian.

[edit] any wikipedia entry in any language should have links to the same entry in other languages

advantage: this would make it to a very useful dictionary too, and animate growth of good quality entries in other languages


I just was e.g. searching the term "Legacy system" and found exactly what I was looking for.

BUT:

Actually I need (now as I understand what it is) the German word or German definition or entry. Direct translation to German makes no sense since it is a specific professional definition. As well I need related words in that environment.

Because I was missing it: I suggest for every wikipedia entry a link to the same entry in other languages (indicating if there is an entry and/ or suggesting to write an translation of it in their own language). Those persons searching a very specifi definition may have a high competence to be able and willing to do some free translation work ...and growing their native language WIKIPEDIA

Only specialists know the specific definitions in their field of profession.

regards Edgar Munich, Germany

I am not fully sure what is your point. If you just need a dictionary like translation that'd better fit into a multilingual Wiktionary. For the Wikipedia interwiki links, they should link to articles covering the same topic. However this does not need to be a direct 1:1 translation of the article title - sometimes the article in one WP is split into several related articles, while in the other language it is all covered in one (as in that language it does not have enough text to allow to split it); sometimes the two wikipedias have different naming conventions. And if the article doesn't exist in one language yet, then there will be no interwiki link - while sometimes it may be useful if the original author already prepared it if he knows the translation(s) and they are non-trivial, so it can be activated as soon as the article in the other language is created. However this doesn't work automatically, currently the only way to achieve this is to add a interwiki link in a html comment (like a <!--[[de:Feuersalamander]]--> in the article about the Fire Salamander) and remove the comments manually when the other language article shows up. andy 11:03, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Agree that any wikipedia entry in any language should have links to the same entry in other languages, but I'm not quite sure what your point is, either. I think it's already Wikipedia policy to do this. But, it must be done by hand, because machine translation is not sufficiently reliable. So if your point is that we could and should wave a magic wand and create them all, the answer is no. To do this would greatly reduce the value of the enormous investment we already have in people-checked links. If you'd like to help, and encourage others to help, then by all means do, and welcome. Andrewa 19:41, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

What I think is wanted is this, using as an example en:Teratoma which has interlanguage links to about 8 other wikipedias. One link is to nl:Teratoom. But that page currently links only to en:Teratoma and de:Teratom. What I'd like is for someone to run a 'bot to expand the interlanguage links on nl:Teratoom to include all the interlanguage links on en:Teratoma. Is that not feasible? Una Smith 01:52, 14 March 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Interwiki: central repository feature suggestion

Currently interwiki links follow the principle "each language makes links to each language".  As the number of languages increases, this system becomes more and more difficult to manage.  Very soon we will have hundreds of interlanguage links on some pages.  Perhaps we should have a "central repository" of all interwiki links, with only one "other languages" link at normal pages?  Or perhaps it will be user-defined — either to have a lot of interlanguage links, or only one "other languages" link, or some chosen languages linked directly, and others via "other languages" link. — Monedula 14:08, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes that would be sensible as every time a new language (new_lang) adds an article, it has to go and find every other language (other_lang) that has that article, add the new_lang interwiki to each other_lang, and get all other_lang interwiki links and add them to new_lang.... There is a bot that does this, but it's not used everywhere, and it doesn't work unless there is an interwiki link in the articles to begin with. Dori | Talk 14:17, May 18, 2004 (UTC)
Is there actually a robot that updates interwiki links? If I add a link "latin:draco" to the English "dragon" article, will a robot come along and add a link "english:dragon" to the latin "draco", or should I do that myself?
I think it is preferable if this is done by a robot, because of the possibility of errors and omissions, especially when several languages are involved. Aleph4 15:17, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
I see two different solutions that both could be described as central repository. Which one are you speaking about? One would be an entry like <english>:<italian>,<german>,<hindi>,...; <italian>:<english>,<german>,<hindi>,..., ... in the central repositiory, just moving the long list of interwiki language links out of the article into something else. But still every article in every language needed some entry in the central repository. The other would be using what the Esperantist (I'm not one, but I know one ...) call the help of an intermediate language, i.e. articles on the same topic in every language inking to the same central repository article, which encompasses a list of links to all languages: <english>:<esperanto>, <italian>:<esperanto>, <german>:<esperanto>, <hindi>:<esperanto> and <esperanto>:<english>,<italian>,<german>,<hindi>,... This could help creating preferentiable interwiki links via software, transforming the need for k 1:n relations into n 1:1 relations + one 1:k relation. -- till we *) 21:59, 18 May 2004 (UTC)
The problem here, which I suspect is not obvious to some, is that this is not a "transitive" operation. For example, en:European_dragon links to ca:Drac, which links to en:Dragon, not en:European_dragon. Some languages may have more granularity, or articles just may not line up neatly, so situation this is not very rare, although it's probably under 5%. -- Jmabel 01:22, 19 May 2004 (UTC)
I'm not very sure if this is really a problem. Take, for simplicity, only three languages and eo as intermediate language. Let's assume that eo for dragon is "dracxo". Then we get:
de:Drache -> eo:Dracxo
en:Dragon -> eo:Dracxo
en:European Dragon -> eo:Dracxo
ca:Drac -> eo:Dracxo
A automagically language link system could now turn these around and create, for ca:Drac, the following list of links:
ca:Drac -> eo:Dracxo -> de:Drache, en:Dragon, en:European Dragon
So the "only" probleme is that there would be two links for en. Depending on implementation, this could be a big probleme (now), or could be a very small probleme (if the central repositiory creates an extra webpage with possible translations, i.e. you have the article Drac in ca, click on "Other languages", and get a web page which lists all other links (with language and target language article name), listing English twice. Or you could get a language list at the top of the article, but with a slightly enlarged syntax: ca:Drac would then have links like "Deutsch", "English (1, 2)", "Esperanto" at the top of the article, linking to de:Drache, en:Dragon, en:European Dragon, eo:Dracxo ...
Where is my logical error? -- till we *) 15:31, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Need genuine traditional Chinese section

Traditional Chinese articles are still listed under zh.wikipedia.org, which is the simplified Chinese section. Not only the website writes all the menus in simplified Chinese, it also mixes traditional articles with simplified ones. Is it possible to truely separate the two? Thanks. Peter Kwok 06:04, 2004 May 25 (UTC)

[edit] Ugly Klingon InterWiki

Does anyone know what caused Klingon to be forced to polute the article text with their Interwiki on other Wikipediae? Aliter 13:11, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

They're not forced to do any such thing. The idea was that Klingon articles would not be linked to from en. -- Tim Starling 14:10, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)

Then why does this link tlh:Sol Hovtay' show up in-text in all Wikipedia? Not linking from a specific Wikipedia I can understand. It would mean informing the programmers of most Interwiki-bots, but it would be that specific Wikipedia's choice. But that's not what happens.
What happens is that there is InterWiki for Klingon, but accross all Wikipediae it's not regarded as an other-language version of the article. That I don't understand, and I would like to know what's causing it. Aliter 14:29, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

See [2] and associated posts. -- Tim Starling 14:53, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Klingon interwiki? Andrewa 03:40, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Can we fix this now? It seems stupid, and messes up pages to have the links at the bottom. Even Deutche Velle has a Klingon Language edition now anyway. Flapflap 16:30, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Yes, is there any way to open up this discussion? It seems pretty ridiculous not to allow proper language linking. Intrigue 23:16, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Klingon interwiki?

I just noticed that the Klingon interwiki links don't work. I mean when you put them in all nice they appear at the bottom of the page and not at the side. I don't know anything about Klingon so I don't know if this is a problem they know about. It doesn't seem to work for any pages. I am not so concerned about it because it is not my problem. However, if they have problems, what other lesser language is not getting representation? --metta, The Sunborn ☸ 00:15, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Only Klingon. This really should be mentioned somewhere, but I think it was a compromise between the bureaucrats of "real" languages and Klingon. They will allow Klingon interwikis, but they won't be included along all the "real" languages. (Real must be put in quotes because Esperanto and Interlingua are on there, and they're constructed along with Klingon - the only difference is scale and inspiration). So, you can interwiki to Klingon, but it is kept at the bottom of the page, instead of on the sidebar. So far as I know, the only other language with a similar problem was minnan (?) and I think that's fixed now, that was a genuine bug. --Golbez 00:50, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
No, as I understand it, you aren't supposed to interwiki link at all. We have a wiki in klingon, but you aren't supposed to link to it. →Raul654 22:26, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
My recollection matches Raul's -- the agreement was (after long debate) that the objections to the Klingon thing boiled down to the fact that links to a Klingon WP would fuel our critics' fires, but if the thing couldn't be linked to, then no one minded if it happened to use Wikimedia server space. So any Klingon interwiki links should be removed according to policy, I believe, though goodness knows where that's written. I don't have any personal passion to remove them, anyway. :-) Jwrosenzweig 22:54, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Excepting the single external link from Klingon language and interwikis on talk pages, I hope? The Klingon Wikipedia is stupid silly, but if hard-core Trekkies want to build it, why not? • Benc • 22:56, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
It is no more silly than the Esperanto wiki, more people speak Klingon than Esperanto. But if that is what has been agreed on, then I don't care one way or the other. It is not like I am going to learn either language.--metta, The Sunborn ☸ 21:10, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
More people speak Klingon than Esperanto?! I'm afraid I don't buy this for a second. There are thought to be as many as 2 million moderately fluent speakers of Esperanto, and over the last century a considerable body of literature has emerged. The Klingon language article doesn't appear to give a figure for the number of speakers, but I hardly think it comes anywhere near Esperanto. The article does say that only three books have been published in the language, a tiny figure. — Trilobite (Talk) 09:52, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Well, yea, I don't see a reason not to link from Klingon language. (Actually, personally, I'd love to see that as a main page featured article ;) )→Raul654 23:06, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
Here is a the announcement of the decision and a brief mention of the discussions that led to it. The decision at least probably should be better documented, although this post is not hard to find if you look at talk:Klingon language.
It's probably not good to reopen this debate IMO. It will happen one day I guess, as the compromise seems to have been brokered between a very few people compared to the large number interested, and it's a rather strange one IMO. In a nutshell the result of some people wanting to give Klingon less prestige and prominence has been that it's received unique treatment and become very prominent indeed. Life's like that sometimes. Andrewa 03:05, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Interlinking with WikiTravel

I don't know just how closely Wikitravel and Wikipedia are linked (in terms of brainpool; I know why travel is separate, and the differences in license, etc.) but I thought it might be useful to maintain a policy of interlinking between the two. I.e. their WikiTravel page on Charlotte would extlink to Charlotte, North Carolina, and ours would extlink to their page on it. That way, the two projects complement each other without actually joining together. Are there any objections to this, or comments, or? --Golbez 01:01, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

Wouldn't hurt. Wikitravel already has a page on links to Wikipedia for the other direction. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:51, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Don't need an official policy, just be bold and do it. I'm sure many will thank you for it. --Phil | Talk 11:57, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)
I've done a couple of these, but I'm no longer active in WikiTravel. Go for it, I'm sure virtually everyone will see this as a plus. -- Jmabel 21:47, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

See also: User talk:Patrick#wikitravel:. Regards Gangleri | Th | T 09:35, 2005 Feb 9 (UTC)

[edit] What is the correct preferred order?

I've tried to read through the discussions, but I'm not clear as to the consensus.

What is the current policy regarding order of interwiki links? The last time I checked, it was alphabetical in based on the two-letter (or whatever) codes. This makes sense to me because it is easy to keep consistent—anyone can do it.

On the other hand, lately people have been doing the opposite. I realize it may be more correct, but it's enormously confusing. I can't read Japanese, Chinese, or Korean characters (for example), so I don't know where to place them in the order. It seems needlessly complicated to expect everyone to know this.

At this point I'm pretty much aware of the fact that "fi" links will display as "Suomi", but it can be confusing when you're editing the article and you have to think. "Okay, it says 'fi', so that means 'Finnish', which in Finnish is 'Suomi'..." Not only do you have to know what the language code stands for, but you also have to know what it translates to (since the language codes usually stand for the English names). [[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 21:46, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

There is no policy. There is a poll at Wikipedia:Language order poll, but I'm not quite sure what's going on with it. For example as far as I know there's no end date, so I guess we will have to wait for a solution for an infinite time. --Lakefall 12:47, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)
There's no policy. The poll was just an informal survey, not a policy vote, which aimed to see whether there was enough of a consensus to create a policy for this, but since there wasn't, a policy was never made. It might be worth speaking to Andre Engels or other people who run interwiki bots to see which order those are adding the links, as they are more likely to be doing something consistent. Angela.

I'm interested in this question because I'd like to create a tool for correctly updating all interwiki links for a topic across all Wikipedias, and the Wikipedias seem to be divided on this matter. In one test article, ar, en, fr, nl, id, sv, and pl ordered by language name, while ca, da, de, et, es, eo, hu, it, ja, pt, zh ordered by two-letter codes. This is the main point of contention; the only other main difference is that they use HTML % codes to varying degrees (probably due to auto-conversion on save) and the French Wikipedia puts theirs at the beginning on one line. Deco 23:49, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

On the English Wikipedia, it seems that the :ja link is always after the :ko link, which is a pet peeve of mine. I try to fix it, but it's an uphill battle. Why is this. Also, the :he and :nl links are more often than not out of order. On all the other Wikipedia languages, the interlanguazge links are in perfect alpha beta order, making it much easier for those who are bilingual to compare and add these links. GilliamJF 15:06, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] How to deal with multiple articles in another language.

(moved from Multiple interlanguage links) --JonnyJD 22:06, 5 May 2007 (UTC) I'd like to fold both koryo and gendai budo into budo (all three are currently sub-stubs). But I can't because language "es" has different articles for gendai budo and koryo (and nothing at all for budo). While I can put both links in, all that shows up is the word "Espanol" twice; certainly not useful. I don't speak Spanish, and I don't know enough about Japanese martial arts to do anything useful like flesh out the articles. Do I just let it sit? --Andrew 14:23, Apr 20, 2004 (UTC)

Gendai Budo and koryu budo link to each other anyway, so maybe you could just link to whichever you feel is the most relevant. People following that link will easily be able to get to the other one once they are at es:. Or perhaps something needs to be written at es:budo and we could link to that. I'm not sure if the Spanish Wikipedia have a page for requests like that, but you could at their café. Angela. 19:36, Apr 20, 2004 (UTC)
What is one supposed to do when several articles in one language correspond to a single article in another? Zemleroi (ru.wikipedia.org) Oct 24, 2005
Don't link either one of them because it will create a Wikipedia:Interwiki linking conflicts conflict so that no bot can figure out how to add interwikilinks. --JonnyJD 22:03, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

I noticed that X (anime) has two interlanguage links to Français. The problem is that the English article covers the X anime television series, movie, and manga, while the French wikipedia appears to have seperate articles on the Manga and Anime. However, only the name of the language appears on-screen, resulting in a very confusing set of interlanguage links. What is the correct way to deal with this situation? - RedWordSmith 18:53, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I see that User:Topbanana/Reports/This article links more than once to another wikipedia says to pick one and go with it. I guess that's what I'll do. - RedWordSmith 02:41, Nov 26, 2004 (UTC)

I have another opinion: The English article Sugar substitute both handles artificial supersweeters such as Sucralose, but also sugar alcohols. The German Wikipedia has two separate articles for that. It would be a loss of information if en-Wikiusers were detained access to both articles. Of course it would be best if the articles in the Wikipedias were synchronized, then there wouldn't be any such problems. --Abdull 20:00, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Interwiki cleanup for bots

I have some interwiki link-related questions on Wikipedia talk:Bots. The User:Pearle bot will be doing interwiki and category link cleanup on articles which it has some other reason to edit. Your comments are requested. Thanks. -- Beland 00:53, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Interwiki-Link-Checker

As you might now, there are lots of articles in en:Wikipedia which have the same name as articles in other Wikipedias, but are not linked by an Inter-Wiki-Link (e.g. en-de: ~5600 articles, en-sv: ~3800 articles, as of last month).

These articles have been listed for many language combinations by de:Benutzer:SirJective. But not all articles with identical names are about the same subject, so human work is needed to decide whether an Interwiki-Link can be automatically generated by a bot. In order to make this decision easy and comfortable, there is a brilliant tool called Interwiki-Link-Checker written by de:Benutzer:Flacus.

You might want to check the FAQ or just try it at http://www.flacus.de/wikipedia/Interwiki-Link-Checker/index-en.html.

Translations of the FAQ and the graphical user interface of the tool into some languages need to be done, too.

I hope that this is a goodplace to put this suggestion, but if any of you could put this text into an even better place, this would be great.

Thanks for your time and (maybe even) help, I can just invite you to try the tool, it's fun and you're reading (and editing) quite a lot of stuff you wouldn't stumble upon otherwise.

Cheers, --InterwikiLinksRule 19:03, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Links to pages that do not exist

> you can comment them out <

What does this mean? (Be tolerant: I've only been speaking English for about 55 years). -- Picapica 16:29, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What order?

Why can't there be a small script that runs when you save a page to order them in a standardized way (which could be used across all language versions of Wikipedia)? It seems counterintuitive to alphabatize by the two letter code (since the reader only sees the names), and for contributors who don't know Japanese is Nihongo, they wouldn't have to. Halal 04:49, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] New Fodder for the Interwiki-Link-Checker

For those of you who have already used this brilliant tool: New data is available!
For example ~5000 new article pairs en-de, ~4000 pairs en-fr and so on... It's worth mentioning that through the help of dozens of users from different Wikipedias more than 30.000 new Interwiki links have been established during the last 3 month. Brilliantly done, everybody! But now it's time to go back to work again ;-).
The Interwiki-Link-Checker is waiting, please notice that Javascript again has to be disabled (see FAQ).


For those of you who are not familiar with this great tool: Check it out!
Detailed Information is given three sections further up, alternatively browse the FAQ or go straight to the Interwiki-Link-Checker page. (Remark:Javascript needs to be disabled, see FAQ)

Cheers --InterwikiLinksRule 23:08, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Just curious...

Is there any list, or can one be easily generated, that show which articles have the most Interlanguage links? BlankVerse 14:05, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Not the solution, but the most interlanguage-link article should be Wikipedia --manop 19:50, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Interlanguage links in Templates?

Is possible to make Interlanguage links in Templates? It is bad, because it adds and additional link in articles. But it could be usefull in traslation templates to wikipedias of other languages. Is there any solution? --Snek01 14:08, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Solution is to add <noinclude> </noinclude> --Snek01 14:39, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What is the correct preferred order? Round 2

I'd like to revive this discussion, since I start noticing minor edits moving the order to and fro.

The poll seems to give an insignificant preference to the 2-letter code order. Are we waiting for software update, for automatic sorting? mikka (t) 22:42, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Interlanguage content is sometimes a partial match

One language wikipedia may have a large article with a number of discrete sections, while these sections may each equate to a seperate article in another language Wikipedia. This has come up at Anemoi (see the talk page), where inline interlangauge links have been proposed. At least two editors above have had similar problems. Perhaps a guideline would be useful here? ntennis 07:34, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I added the section Help:Interlanguage_links#Interlanguage_link_to_a_section.--Patrick 11:00, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
You should not add (normal) interwikilinks to sections, because it messes up the logical structure. The reason is: Bots automatically check which articles are connected to each other by following interwikilinks. They set all missing interwikilinks corresponding to that. If one article is connected to two articles in another language over the links (over several hops), then we have a conflict and the bot can't automatically set the links. Sometimes it still works out, because there is only one article for one section at the moment. This can change quite fast and there is no easy way to check this due to the recursive linking between many languages over many hops.
Therefore you should only put interwikilinks when the topic covered is the same and not only partial. You can put inline links instead, as these aren't covered by bots, but you should consider if it is worth it. Having too many foreign links in an article isn't a good concept. -- JonnyJD 12:24, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
It is not quite satisfactory that bots restrict what refinements can be done manually. Perhaps bots should ignore interlanguage links to sections: they are put in the case that there is no whole article on the subject. If a separate article is created later the worst thing that can happen is that the bot creates also an interlanguage link to the new article, which is not a problem but a useful indication that the manual section link can be manually removed, after manually confirming that it is no longer needed.--Patrick 13:39, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
You are right. That isn't satisfactory. But it's a fact at this time and we have to cope with it. What you are suggesting, is two kinds of interwikilinks. Automatically maintained and manually maintained ones. Actually, there is something similar. We have normal and inline interwikilinks. Well you can improve the way interwikilinks are handled by the software and the bots, but in my opionion we already have a nice tool here. It's not perfect, but we still have to do a lot of work to use the possibilities of that one. A more complex system would also be more error prone. And there is another thing we should consider: There isn't always a direct connection between articles. We shouldn't force one. And we also need the help of bots. There wouldn't be such a big number of interlanguage links everywhere without them. Actually, a lot of the times when you don't have that many languages, it is because of a conflict. That is why you shouldn' generate those conflicts directly. There are enough of them generated by moving articles and similar things. -- JonnyJD 15:54, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
I see, thanks.--Patrick 10:23, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Cool, you wrote a section about that on the help page. And it is also nice and understandable, I like that. I would have written it way to complicated, I guess. :-) -- JonnyJD 12:10, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
* Applause *. Thanks guys! - ntennis 04:52, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Interlanguage link order (again)

According to Wikipedia:Language order poll ordering by "alphabet, based on local language" and "alphabet, based on two letter code" are by far the two most popular orders, with the later being marginally more popular, but there is certainly no consensus.

The problem is that I'm sure everyone would agree that it would be beneficial if there was a consensus, as we could then make the order consistent across articles.

I am therefore proposing that the guideline order becomes "alphabet, based on local language" as this is the most used due to the pywikibots sorting in that order. Although the other method of sorting was popular in the poll, it is less used, and it is about time we agreed properly which way we should all do it, for the benefit of all. The language orders can be seen at m:Interwiki sorting order. thanks, please say if you agree or disagree. Martin 21:30, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Please see http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2867 for a related sorting order discussion, and add your vote. --Yurik 18:54, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
Interesting, but the devs don't seem too keen. Either way, if the software is going to automatically sort the links, we need to know which order first. thanks Martin 19:09, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
If we have automatic sorting then the decision could be based solely on a usability for the reader instead of having to care about what is easiest to edit and maintain. We still have to decide how English Wikipedia sorts them though. But there is no need for every user to know how they should be sorted anymore then. Jeltz talk 15:38, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Where to report a problem with interlang. link title (Turkmen)?

I described what is wrong with the Turkmen link title at Talk:Turkmen language#Wikipedia interlanguage link title is wrong. I don't know who should fix it. Could you please report it to the right place.--Imz 23:41, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] How many articles from non-English wiki are have equivalents on English wiki?

A question I asked at WP(A) - perhaps you know the answer? Please post there.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 21:24, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with Wikipedia:Interwikimedia link?

It seems to me that both pages are on a very similar topic, why not merge them? Please discuss it here.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 21:24, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Images

Will these work with images? Wizrdwarts (T|C|E) 00:21, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Indonesian and Malaysian interlanguage links...

To any bot operators or anyone who does not know already: The word Bahasa in Bahasa Indonesia (id), Bahasa Malaysia (ms), Bahasa Jawa (jw), etc. means only language. That's why I don't like to see these languages sorted under B in the interlanguage link order. Considering that almost every language has the word "language" in it, we should not sort any of them under L or B for that matter. (On the main page or anywhere). Thanks! - GilliamJF 06:08, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Foreign Categories"

Justa quickie, hopefully in close to the right place. How do I make a French Wiki page appear in an English language category?

Railwayfan2005 23:28, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Specificity

Should an interlanguage link only point to an article whose title corresponds precisely, or to the article which most nearly overlaps the topic, or somewhere in-between?

I was surprised to find that bots are being used to remove interlanguage links which would be useful to foreign-language readers—for example, in this edit, a link from Fajr-3 to he:רקטת פג'ר and ru:Фаджер ("Fajr", which covers the closely-related Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rocket launchers) was simply removed. The bot's admin informed me that this is standard procedure, but this guideline is vague on the subject, saying only that interlanguage links point "to the same subject". —Michael Z. 2006-11-24 21:10 Z

[edit] Links to deprecated Wikipedias

Should ILLs to frozen, read-only projects such as mo: (Cyrillic Moldovan) be included or not? -- Jao 12:28, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Propagation of errors by bots

This help page says "The downside is that an error in an interlanguage link in one Wikipedia propagates to other Wikipedias. Thus if a bot produces a wrong result one may have to search for the underlying error in another language version of Wikipedia." I have some questions:

1. How does one know which is the "underlying error". Does one have to search ALL the languages which are linked?

2. What does one do if one does not read all the linked languages. I recently noticed an article which linked to articles in French, German, Spanish and Italian, all of which I read well enough to be certain that the target articles are irrelevant; and also linked to Bulgarian and Korean which I cannot read at all. I discussed this with the (Dutch) bot operator and we eventually got it fixed, but at one point he thought that the error was propagated from Bulgarian which neither he nor I can read. So how does one fix an error in a language one cannot read at all??

3. Is there a tool to speed up the checking? Perhaps if one could display the article titles in all the languages together? Dirac66 19:26, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

1. If you are not somehow very lucky, you have to check ALL.
2. Most of the time you kind of realize what the basic mistake is that was made through linking. When you have some understanding of the important buzz words, after reading some of the articles you understand and are looking at sections, pictures etc., then you can have a good guess what should be different. (i.e. you can see if an article is about a city, or just the most famous building) That's the way I do it when I have time to. It really gets difficult when it comes to letters you can't read. (I can read kyrillian stuff, but Chinese is beyond me..) But even then you can have a look at some numbers, pictures and also on some outgoing links (which have translations again). Altogether this is a very interesting task, but also very time consuming. Some of them are tricky because of the topic itself (like Kebap, this would be a BIG project), but there are also simple ones.
3. I use the IW-fixer. It doesn't do any change on its own at the moment, but it really helps to have an overview over all the connected pages and you can sort them into groups quite well. You have to do ALL the changes on your own (even if that is supposed to be done by the IW-fixer bot, sometime), but you get lost without this tool as an overview.
I hope this helps. I would like to help more with the links, but unfortunately I don't have time for it anymore. -- JonnyJD 22:45, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Link to latin script variant of Kazakh Language Wikipedia Main Page ?

The Kazakh language Wikipedia is written in three versions: with cyrilic, latin and arabic alphabets. You can switch among them by clicking their respectives tabs on top of the page. I need to provide an interwiki link to the Main Page of the Kazakh Language Wikipedia but the default [[:kk:]] code gives me the cyrillic version and I want the latin script version of it [3]. How can I do this ? --InfoCan (talk) 18:10, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bots should not remove links

I propose that bots should not be allowed to remove interlanguge links (except perhaps in certain special cases, like two links to the same language on the same page).

Reason: a bot cannot possibly decide whether a link is useful or not. Only a human (with a reasonable understanding of both relevant languages) can make the decision. At the moment it seems that some bots (e.g. PipepBot, with whose owner I have tried to discuss this matter), delete links on the basis of some algorithm (maybe something like: if en:A links to de:B and de:B links to en:C, then delete the link to de:B on en:A). I don't believe that such an algorithm can ever be reliable, because:

  • these algorithms seem to assume one-to-one correspondence between articles in different languages;
  • there is not in fact such a correspondence, and the links structure should be sufficiently flexible to allow for that;
  • even if we did insist on one-to-one linking (which is not agreed policy as far as I can tell), a bot would not be able to tell which is the wrong link, e.g. in the example above it might be the link on the de:B page which is wrong.

Even humans I think need to be urged not to be too officious in deleting inexact links, which are often more helpful than no link at all. --Kotniski (talk) 11:22, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

My bot PipepBot is running pywikipedia interwiki bot. It never deletes interwiki links automatically. Every time the bot sees a problem it asks me, and I decide what to do. --Pipep (talk) 20:11, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I discussed this topic a year ago already. We NEED an exact one-one relationship if we want to be able to interchange interwikilinks in different pages. We need to do that automatically, because this is the only chance to maintain that many interwikilinks in that many different languages. Nobody can speak all these languages to check them manually so we have to be strict about the relationsship. Everything else is going to lead to interwiki conflicts. The bad part about these is not, that these are inaccurate in 1 or 2 languages. The bad part is that no bot can update these links anymore because it is not clear how they relate to each other.
I understand that you want everything to be flexible, but then everything has to be handmade. Do you want to edit interwikilinks in 10 or 15 different languages on 10 or 15 wikis? You would have to to do that for EVERY article. The 1-1 relationship is not a restriction because we are not smart enough to write better bots. This is a restriction we have because of the underlying logic. Unless we have bots able to read the content in the article, but then we could create the whole wikipedia automatically from content stored somewhere. Plus: Unless you show me a concept that would work without 1-1 relationsships and I can't prove that it won't. On the other hand I don't feel like writing a proof of my concept because this is somewhat more timeconsuming than just proving that something doesn't work, but I guess it was done somewhere already, maybe for an equivalent problem.
You are definetely right that a bot shouldn't decide what's the wrong link to remove (if there is a conflict). However, if you see a bot removing a link this could also mean that a human gave the order to do so. In that case it is only semiautomatic and it can really help in solving conflicts. If that deletion was wrong then the person solving the conflict was wrong and people should discuss that. I am not that active solving conflicts at the moment, but if anybody has a question are needs a third opinion: tell me and I will have a look since I am still interested in the topic. --JonnyJD (talk) 23:45, 25 March 2008 (UTC) I also tried to explain why the deletion in question was correct and necessary here: it:Discussioni_utente:Pipep#PipepBot
Please have a look also at #Interlanguage_content_is_sometimes_a_partial_match. This also deals with basically the same topic. --JonnyJD (talk) 00:11, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I see the issue, but one possible solution which springs to mind is this: instead of deleting (without replacement) a link to a partial match, just add a comment after it in the wikitext, something like
[[ja:XXX]]< !-- partial match -- >
Then program the bots not to promulgate such links further, and to replace them automatically when they get a good match; i.e. from the bot's point of view the link is effectively deleted, but for the human user it remain available until something better comes along.--Kotniski (talk) 10:02, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
I work a lot with iw links, but only manually - i just never tried running a bot, and in any case i have to think for myself too often to let a bot decide.
I have a very strong opinion about having one-to-one relationships whenever possible. When it is not possible, i prefer not to have a link at all.
I am not not against bots, like some people. They are doing a fantastic job compensating for what i consider as a bug: different versions of Wikipedia have almost zero coordination on what articles and categories they should include and what should their structure be. It's not perfect, but for me it's as good as it gets, and all in all, it's probably the most viable compromise for people who want the Wikipedia in their language be an independent community.
AFAIK, bots delete a link when they identify that an article was deleted in the other Wikipedia. That is a good thing, and that should make people consider deleting that article in their Wikipedia too - or, if they think that the subject of that article does deserve to be written about, to go the extra mile to that other Wikipedia and propose its re-creation.
People raise an eyebrow when i do such things through embassies in foreign Wikipedias, but that should happen more. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 15:27, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
Well, I basically agree with everything you're saying, except the bit about preferring no link at all to a non-1-to-1 link. Can you expand on that (i.e. explain why)?--Kotniski (talk) 16:13, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
Truth is one. In a perfect world, all Wikipedias have the same information in different languages. (Unlike some people, i don't think that in a perfect all people speak one language; linguistic diversity is A Good Thing.) If the information is the same, then it's structure and organization should be the same.
That was the philosophical part. The practical part is that it is a nightmare to maintain, for both bots and humans. I often encounter situations of this kind.
In reality i very rarely delete links brutally. Usually i bring one Wikipedia in harmony with the other. Sometimes it means that i write a new article, sometimes i restructure the categories, sometimes i split and merge existing articles. That's something that bots cannot do.
I mostly harmonize between Hebrew and English Wiki's, but i also lurk on ru, uk, ca, it, es and a few others. (It's a terrific way to learn languages, too.) Sometimes the Hebrew one is better, sometimes the English one. Nothing is holy. As in nearly all things in Wikipedia, BE BOLD is the number one rule and nearly always it works wonderfully. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:54, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
I hope you read the two discussion links I gave you further up. You can do some manual partial match, but you shouldn't do that as a normal interwikilink. Just include it in a decent part of the article if it really IS that important even if it is only a partial match. (prepend another ":" in the link) Then it is a connection, but it is also made clear that this is NOT a 2-way connection because it is no 1-1 link.
The suggestion you made is somewhat errorprone with the exact formatting, but the real problem is, that the user can still get lost, because he has no defined way back and this should be possible with all the interwikis shown on the left side. Therefore, just make it a link in the text, if it is important or leave it if there is no direct connection. If we start doing partial matches officially then we end up with a lot of wild links to everywhere. (everybody would argue that there is some relation or one part that actually is discussed in both articles) --JonnyJD (talk) 18:45, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
Well, I see I'm in the minority here, but I still don't agree. Surely the ability to go to some relevant article in one's own/other language is more important than the fact of always automatically going back to where you came from (which you can do anyway using the browser's "Back" button). And everyone's used to finding the interlanguage links where they are - users aren't going to start trawling through articles looking for additional inline ones. As far as I can see the suggestion I made above would solve the maintenance problem for bots. And I'm not proposing that more than one link to a particular language be allowed in any article, so the proliferation of "wild" links would remain firmly in check. --Kotniski (talk) 19:24, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
partial linking is very bad. interwiki bots do a very good job of propagating interwiki links. those bots do no actually add links. if en:X links to de:X and de:X links to sv:X. the bot adds sv to the en article and en to sv even knowing there is no direct link. Add in a few more languages and partial matchs become a quagmire. βcommand 2 23:53, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Have you looked at my suggestion above (the one about adding a comment in the wikitext after partial links)? As far as I can see it will solve this bot problem completely, while allowing humans to continue to see links which are likely to be useful to them.--Kotniski (talk) 08:58, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't believe that users will create clearly formatted entries so the bots can realize what type of interwikilink this is and do the right format for the right link (partial or complete). I don't want to offend anybody, but my experience shows that users quite often don't see the difference between partial matches and complete matches and having two formats makes this rather more complicated. Maybe I am wrong and users are quite aware of the surrounding issues. In this case we would need a new styleguideline for that and all the bots have to be rewritten BEFORE people add these partial links. So you should find a platform to discuss this with the bot-scripters and you will have to argue with them so they include that change. --JonnyJD (talk) 18:27, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't expect users to format these links either, but that isn't the point. The bots would add these comments, to exactly the links that they currently delete (except obviously links to non-existent or totally irrelevant articles, which would still be deleted). Of course there's a chance that editors will not understand the importance of the comments and delete them, but that can hardly be more of a problem than the situation we have now - where editors keep putting in reasonable links of the type the bots delete.
I agree of course that this would be best discussed with the bot-scripters - any idea where to find them?--Kotniski (talk) 16:10, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
We already had that topic. Bots DON'T delete links without user input. There is at least a user telling the bot what links to delete. It's not that it would work automatically. We have huge lists of interwiki conflicts that need to be solved and if you see that as the point when the comment gets inserted then it simply doesn't work. It will create more conflicts that need to be solved, because you encourage to use partial links. The only difference would be the way how conflicts get solved (changing link types rather than deletion), but we would have a lot more broken interwikis and still not enough people willing working on them. Having more of these is a must before we try to improve the complexity of the links imho. Have a look at at lists like this: de:Wikipedia:Interwiki-Konflikte. The list is not even near complete and you can work a while on fixing a single conflict..
I haven't found something better yet to reach scripters other than leaving a note on every bot owner or similar. --JonnyJD (talk) 18:16, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
OK, I know bots are supposed not to delete links without user input. What I'm proposing is that, in cases where now the user (bot owner) gives the go-ahead for a delete, s/he should have a third option, namely "mark as partial match". Then the comment gets added (presumably the bot could do this, after the user clicks the button), and from then on that link is, from the bots' point of view, not there (well, they just have to remember to delete it if they find a better link in the same language). This does not affect the number of conflicts at all, for better or for worse, because regardless of whether the link is deleted or commented, the bots stop looking at it, so it can't possibly cause a conflict. However it does allow a potentially useful link to be retained for human users, who are the ones for whom we are presumably building this encyclopedia.--Kotniski (talk) 09:25, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
If you allow partial matches officially then more of these get added so you get more conflicts, because people start adding more partial matches because it "works" (not automatically) now. Changing rules also changes the editing behavior of people.
This is basically the same issue like deleting irrelevant articles. We do that to get higher quality articles (or interwikilinks) rather than just as many as we can get, because we don't have an infinite number of people working on wikipedia. Of course, this is one major disagreement between en.wiki and de.wiki (where I come from) --JonnyJD (talk) 10:21, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
Well, I sort of see your point, but as far as I know there is no rule at the moment against adding partial matches (it's just a preference that bot owners try to impose), and indeed people do add such links, hence the large number of conflicts. In fact, under my suggestion, the rules could be changed to specifically require that people adding partial links mark them as such using a standard comment; that might actually reduce the number of conflicts that the bots and their owners have to sort out.--Kotniski (talk) 10:41, 7 April 2008 (UTC)