Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Archive/Language-neutral Wikidata-based Commons categories

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Language-neutral Wikidata-based Commons categories

N Outside the scope of Community Tech

Problem: Wiki Commons is described as multilingual, but most of categories are in English, even in countries where English is not a spoken language. For newbies or people that are not used to work in Commons this can be a huge problem, even more if they do not know English. Could be the case to upload an image of a church and search for the category "Iglesia del Santo Niño" but find nothing, even if this church is native from the place of the user, because the church is in category "Church of the Holy Child" or alike.
Who would benefit: The multilingual community of Commons
Proposed solution: Recall the name of a category in your own language from a Wikidata item
More comments:
Phabricator tickets:
Proposer: Sahaquiel9102 (talk) 19:59, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

I like the idea. Gryllida 22:53, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Would be a huge change and many will have to be done by hand but it would be great if we get this working. --GPSLeo (talk) 10:49, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Gryllida, GPSLeo, and Sahaquiel9102: Something like this would probably be accomplished by c:Commons:Structured data (= Wikidata for files), which is already an in-progress WMF project. I don't know if it would be particularly beneficial to additionally make categories multilingual. Jc86035 (talk) 12:45, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think this would be useful and solve some conflicts I've seen due to this problem. NMaia (talk) 16:12, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The practical problem of finding the right category is much easier solved by redirects: Berliner Dom → Berlin Cathedral, Крим → Crimea, Крым → Crimea, etc. But if this is a step from hard coded category names to IDs with attached names, it is certainly a good idea for more general reasons. Renaming a category should be a change in one place, and not require changing all the files and pages in it. Watchduck (talk) 19:49, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Jc86035:, definitively the spirit of this proposal is according to the Structured Data in Commons project. But it is already developing, and the best way to make them consider this is to vote for it. @Watchduck:, redirections do not solve the problem when searching manually in the tree of categories, because the name of the category is only viewed in one language (more of the times in English). Sahaquiel9102 (talk) 21:11, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Also recently suggested by User:Donald Trung at c:Commons_talk:Structured_data#Could_Wikidata_be_used_to_create_non-English_category_names_for_existing_categories? -- and something that I think has been on many WikiCommons people's personal wishlists for a very long time.

Non-English searching should be getting better, now that c:Template:Wikidata Infobox is starting to fetch labels and descriptions in all languages known to Wikidata and to write them into the page where the search indexer can find them. The infobox also displays a label, description, and data, localised to a user's own language, to the extent that data is available on Wikidata.

But it would still be nice to make the Category names fully multilingual. I suspect it probably wouldn't be too hard to show the Wikidata label instead of the English category name at the top of the category page (or alternatively, to show it as a subtitle) -- after all, template Wikidata infobox already shows it easily enough. But implicit in the OP's suggestion is to go further than that, I think, to make the category name completely multilingual. That involves more challenges I think, so I am interested to see what strategies people may have for how they might be overcome. For example, it is the English category name that is used as a key in all the MediaWiki databases; it is the English name that is used in the wikitext [[:Category:...]] statements at the bottom of file pages; and while those are the case, they sort-of require that the English name is given prominence on the category page itself, so people know how to indicate it. Of course, for non-English speakers it's far from intuitive to be expected to have to categorise files in English, so what do we think can be done about it.

One stepping stone might be to try to make tools like HotCat and Cat-a-lot multilingual, using the same multilingual labels from Wikidata that the infobox displays. But even this has another problem: Wikidata labels may be not disambiguated (they don't need to be, since it is the Wikidata Q-number that is the primary unique identifier for a Wikidata page, not any label). So Wikidata labels wouldn't necessary be enough to specify a unique category on Commons, even if Cat-a-lot etc could be modified to accept and interpret them. Though perhaps the Cat-a-lot drop-down menu could offer Wikidata descriptions by way of disambiguation.

That still wouldn't help international users editing in wikitext. But perhaps it would be enough for a start. Jheald (talk) 23:38, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hope for multilingual categories. --Visem (talk) 03:01, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Sahaquiel9102 and all: This proposal falls under the [[Structured Data on Commons project, which is currently in progress. Community Tech won't be able to work on it, unfortunately. I'm going to archive this proposal, but check out that project page, and you can talk to that team. Thanks for participating in the survey. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]