[WikiEN-l] Category translation

Tue Jun 6 17:15:50 UTC 2006

On 6/6/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/06/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> > That brings up another, longer term, to-do for categories: they should
> > be language independent.  For instance [[Marie Curie]] is in de: and
> > en: (they happen to have the same title, but even if they don't they
> > are linked via interwiki links).  [[Kategorie:Pole]] is linked to
> > [[Category:Polish people]].  So there should be no need to categorize
> > Marie Curie twice (multiply by the actual number of languages which
> > have a Polish people category and an article on Marie Curie).
>
> Hmm... it won't work well.
>
> Basdically, there is no hard and fast en:Article <-> de:Artikel
> relationship, there's no single "meta topic" which manifests itself in
> specific articles in different languages. For some things, like
> people, it does appear so; for others, it'll break down.
>
I don't understand that.  Interwiki links are the hard and fast
en:Article <-> de:Artikel relationship.  Are you unaware of iw links,
or am I misinterpreting what you're saying?  Maybe you could give an
example?

> This is partly due to the incomplete nature of the project, but also
> because different language communities - which, especially for
> languages like German and Polish, represent individual and reasonably
> distinct cultures in a way that en: doesn't - will naturally have
> different emphasis, there'll be different levels of coverage and
> different approaches to fragmenting articles.
>
> Let's say, oh, [[History of Country]].
>
> In one language, this might be a single article. In another,
> time-divided articles (overview; ancient history; history to 1500;
> 1500 to 1900; modern history). In a third, it might be a thematic
> divide (political history; religious history; military history;
> overview).
>
> What combination of categories would work best for *all* of these pages?
>
So are you simply talking about coverage, then?

For those situations where we *don't* have an article on the same
topic in multiple languages, we don't have an interwiki link, and we
wouldn't link the categories.

The situations where we *do* have coverage in multiple languages, of
the same articles and of the same categories, it doesn't make much
sense not to share information.

I think the latter situation is much more widespread than the former.
Not just people: people, places, events, years, fictional works,
scientific concepts, etc.  Hitting random page a couple dozen times I
don't see any articles which *shouldn't* exist across all language
Wikipedias, and many of them already *do* exist across a number of
them.

Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction
between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes
against the intention (this in the context of which languages should
have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well).  We don't have a
British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both
understand each other well enough to communicate.  If it were
*possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language
while keeping the content the same, we'd do so.  It just isn't, at
least not with current technology.

OTOH, interwiki links already give us the automatic translation in
terms of category information.  Yes, there will probably be some
article titles and category titles which don't translate well, but
that's the exception and for those few titles we wouldn't have any iw
links anyway.