[WikiEN-l] Category translation

Sat Jun 10 11:55:43 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:
> 
> Just fwiw, one simple basic example I have dealt with.
> 
> [[fr:Carnac]] discusses both the township of Carnac and the famous
> Carnac stones which are found within the town.
> 
> I split [[en:Carnac]] into that article which only discusses the town,
> and [[en:Carnac stones]] which discusses the megalithic site.

Another example from a different field is [[en:Chloral]] and 
[[en:Chloral hydrate]].  These are two distinct compounds, and the 
interwiki linking quite sensibly follows the distinction.  However, if 
you look at the articles, you'll note that there's a lot of redundant 
information in them: the problem is that the compounds readily convert 
to each other depending on the presence or absence or water, such that 
it's difficult to discuss the chemistry of one without also describing 
the other.

That might make the articles reasonable candidates for merging, and 
indeed many other Wikipedia have done so.  However, there is no 
agreement on which title the combined article should have.  The French 
article, which is the most detailed one, is at [[fr:Chloral]], despite 
mainly describing the hydrate.  The German, Dutch, Russian and Turkish 
Wikipedias only have articles on the hydrate.  Only the English, Polish 
and Japanese Wikipedias have both, and on the latter two both are stubs. 
  So was [[en:Chloral]] before I started expanding it -- most of the 
info is still at the hydrate article.

I suppose the ideal solution would be to either merge or split the 
articles consistently across languages.  But I don't really see that 
happening soon, and in any case the reasonability of having one or two 
articles depends a lot on the amount of information present, which 
varies a lot between different Wikipedias; most, of course, don't have 
any information at all on either compound.

-- 
Ilmari Karonen