Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Archive/Solution to the ‟Bonnie and Clyde” problem

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Solution to the ‟Bonnie and Clyde” problem

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• Problem: Wikidata can only link one article per language. There are, however, cases where a single article in one language corresponds to two articles in some other language. A prototypical instance is Bonnie and Clyde, with most languages having an article about the duo Bonnie and Clyde, some having an article about Bonnie Parker, and some having an article about Clyde Barrow (see also d:WikiProject Cross Items Interwikis). The articles about the individual bank robbers cannot (at least not both) link to the many articles about the duo, which exist in many languages, so it is hard to find the corresponding articles in those other languages when coming from such a single-person article. (Other relevant situations I can think of are misfitting taxonomies; while e.g. in biology the international research community has agreed upon a common hierarchy, this is not the case in many other fields, where it might turn out to be unclear or questionable which term in another language an article should be linked to when there is no perfect match.)
• Who would benefit: Potentially all readers, exact number of relevant cases unknown so far
• Proposed solution: While allowing Wikidata items to link more than one page per language is probably not a viable option, having language links as displayed in Wikipedia side-bars link to more than one article in another language should be principally possible. A language link to a language version in which more than one article is linked to the current one could, for instance, show a pop-up menu instead of directly navigating to the foreign-language article in question. More important than the GUI design for this feature would be the question where to take the target articles from. In the case of Bonnie and Clyde, a language link connecting Bonnie Parker articles (or Clyde Barrow articles, respectively) with Bonnie-and-Clyde articles could be obtained from the ‟part of” relation (d:P361). A sufficiently general solution would perhaps allow for a set of relevant Wikidata relations, to be determined by the Wikidata community, that are used to populate ‟multiple” interwiki connections of the proposed form. Even if the ability to have ‟multiple” interwiki connections is undesired, the Wikidata relations could still be used to connect articles to languages for which a direct equivalent has not yet been registered in Wikidata (either because a corresponding artcile has not yet been linked or because such a corresponding article does not yet exist).
• More comments:
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: 78.50.250.109 23:08, 6 November 2018 (UTC)