Community Wishlist/Wishes/A tool to copy Wikipedia categories to another language Wikipedia
Description
English Wikipedia has both by far the most articles and the most categories. Most of its nonhidden categories are useful.
For countless major categories that are useful there is no equivalent in the major nonenglish Wikipedias.
It is difficult to synchronize a category that already exists on English Wikipedia to another language Wikipedia – one has to do all the categorization manually by hand and that's very time-intensive and not feasible for categories with many pages; it's not being done. I think the main reason is that it's not worth the effort/time.
For example, on German Wikipedia there are no equivalents to useful categories like Category:Governance or Category:1960s science fiction novels.
It would be very useful if there was a tool to create a category based on the English category – or ideally even multiple categories – where it goes through all the pages in it, goes to the linked German article and adds the respective category. Alternatively or additionally, one could also have 'virtual categories' where it shows an English Wikipedia category with the category title machine-translated and it containing the articles in the given language (like German) that are linked to the articles it contains. If the nonenglish Wikipedia has some articles that belong into the category but do not exist in English Wikipedia, those would be missing but such are quite rare and every category can be slightly incomplete in any case and it's quite useful nevertheless.
Categories are pretty useful to find and filter or browse articles about any given subject such as novels written in a given year/period and anything else. That just English Wikipedia has a comprehensive category structure greatly reduces the usefulness and quality of other Wikipedias.
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
Feature request
Related projects
Wikipedia
Affected users
Wikipedia readers and editors of nonenglish Wikipedias
Other details
- Created: 15:39, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
- Last updated: 15:39, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
- Author: Prototyperspective (talk)