[Foundation-l] interwiki links

Thu Mar 31 15:03:56 UTC 2011

On Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:02:22 +0200, "Amir E. Aharoni"
<amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> 2011/3/23 WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers at gmail.com>:
>> But how would this process handle situations such as the EN wiki
>> article [[David Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley]] having an interwiki
>> link to the DE article on his late mother? Currently this comes up as
>> a death anomaly because one is living but the other deceased. Would
>> the central repository handle such linking by showing such links as
>> redirected, or would we continue to have such anomalies? Or would DE
>> wiki consider it an error to link these two articles?
> 
> It should be an error to link those two articles, but in reality links
> to a section in another language are quite common.
> 
> I don't really have a clever solution up my sleeve, but putting the
> links in one place will likely make these situations easier to handle
> but allowing the editors to focus on content and ontology, without
> worrying about updating a long list of links in a lot of projects (and
> no, bots don't always help).
> 

Actually, this is not an answer, more like a question, which may be well
related to the issue. May be it has been discussed earlier but I am not
aware of such discussions.

We have a number of standard types of renewing information. These are for
instance (the list is by far not complete)

* deaths (I guess this is why this Deathnote project started);
* elections and government changes at all levels;
* changes in administrative divisions (for instance here in NL they split
and merge communities several times per year);
* sporting and other records changing: for instance A was a record holder
but then lost her record to B.

Now obviously not all of these changes get reflected in all language
editions immediately. Obviously one can be sure that when a new US
president gets elected or a new chess world champion wins the title, this
information gets spread over all articles on a scale of hours, sometimes
minutes. I am less sure about the elections of the mayor of Recife or
splitting a third level administrative unit in Inner Mongolia into three.
On the other hand, Portuguese Wikipedia is likely to have an up-to-date
info about the mayor of Recife whereas Chinese of Mongolian ones would
record the administrative change in Inner Mongolia. Then it can take months
or even years to make to other Wikipedias. Is there any way we can automate
this? For instance, having a central data bank for this type of changes and
sending bot messages into talk pages of relevant articles in all languages?

Cheers
Yaroslav