[WikiEN-l] Category translation

Tue Jun 6 17:38:32 UTC 2006

On 6/6/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> 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?

They're not always 1:1. One topic might be given a whole article on
one Wikipedia and only a paragraph on another. I'm not aware of any
convention for handling that atm actually.

> 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.

I suspect categories are much less comparable across languages than
articles are, due to different conventions etc. But I don't really
know.

> 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.

Is there an official or even unofficial policy on this? I have
wondered. IMHO, the Wikipedias should *not* be precise translations
though. For example, [[en:Personal pronoun]] should give descriptions
of personal pronouns in all languages, but with emphasis and examples
from English. [[fr:Pronom personnel]] should similarly have an
emphasis on French, because that is the most helpful for French
readers. Whether that extends to cultural matters (should French
articles on cartoons draw more on examples from French cartoons such
as Asterix than on manga for instance) is up for debate.

> 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.

More research needed.

Steve