Talk:A new look at the interwiki link

Ignoring the interwiki bot operators' views

This article has been written by someone who intendedly ignored opinions and discussions from interwiki bot operators, in spite of the fact that these have been brought to his attention before this article was written. -- Quistnix 14:48, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

An alternative plan was discussed here.

When there is no need for running the interwiki.py bot, then there is no need for this alternative plan either. The alternative plan is great in reducing considerably the amount of time needed to run the interwiki.py bot. It is indeed a step forward and I said this in a chat on this subject and I repeat it here.

The thing is Ellywa is correct in her plan. It is a huge improvement and the quality of the interwiki links will be enhanced considerably when it is adopted.

I do want arguments that would argue against this plan. GerardM 14:58, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It is great if you want to make sure 99% of wikipedians cannot do interwikilinks anymore. You are making wikipedia more difficult and more bureacratic with this idea. You presented the idea in the nl.wikipedia channel and everybody there told you so. Waerth 15:16, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I do think you misunderstand the suggestion. What I suggested, is to make a central list of interwiki links. It may look exactly the same as the current interwiki links in the local wikipedia's. The only difference will be, that it will be located on a single location, like images on commons. It will cost much, much less time consuming and stupid work! I do not see why this suggestion is bureaucratic, so please explain so I can understand your comment. Ellywa 16:26, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Please explain why it is more bureacratic.

If it is exactly that and nothing else, the solution will work, and bot operators will still be able to solve incorrect interwiki links by hand, using their bots as a tool. What I don't understand is that this discussion was kept outside the usual mailing lists and pages bot operators read.

Because I simply do not know where to put my ideas. I put it on the Tech mailing list. I informed you about that on june 4. You could have helped me to find my way on this when I informed you of this on your own talk page on NL. I cannot read everything on Wikipedia, it would be a full-time job. And I have another job irl too. But you didn't help me to find my way. GerardM helped me and put it here. You kept quiet at the previous week on this. So, please do not comment in this manner now. Keep your comments to the content. You are killing a serious proposal in this manner. Why?? Ellywa 20:06, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If you discussed this with GerardM, ask him. He knew about my proposal, and where to find it. I told you I had a solution that would reduce the amount of robot work dramatically that involved no extra software apart from a smaal script, and you responded by putting your own proposal in a mailing list I hadn't seen before. And now you're blaming me for my response? Not very nice of you -- Quistnix 22:41, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If I am reading the article correctly, the plan involves more, and I am not sure what the plans are. I am afraid that for making interwikis, all of us need gurus in the future. I don't think that will help any wiki project. -- Quistnix 18:29, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

A step furhter

In reply to

doing interwikis, but not familiar with the Interwiki bot page? How can you talk about cooperation, if you are excluding yourself from it? -- Quistnix 18:06, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Indeed I am not familiar withe the Interwiki bot, nor with bot's in general. My point (and from others) is that this bot is extra work that should not be needed. In the proposal A step further there still is need for a bot for checking links between the languages and the common table, but this is much more simple.
As for cooperation: I meant cooperation on the contents between sisterprojects. Not the cooperation on fixing and maintenence. I personally am not excluding myself from the interwiki team, I am just not including myself in it. HenkvD 18:27, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What exactly is the difference? -- Quistnix 18:30, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The difference between what? HenkvD 19:07, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Gerard, Ellywa and others are exactly right; there should be a single table used for InterWiki and interlanguage links. The present system was not designed with scalability in mind. Essentially, what you need is a central linked list of pages that are related, and this list is displayed on any member page. I started designing such a schema a while ago. I call it "link pools". The table would work rougly as follows:

pool_id    language    article_title
1          en          Main Page    \
1          de          Hauptseite   | one pool 
1          fr          Accueil      /
2          nl          Hoofdpagina  \ another pool
2          sv          Huvudsida    /

You can think of pools essentially as little boxes into which you can put links.

|     | |     |
|     | |     |
|ro de| |da sv|
|_en__| |__fr_|  pl

The rules are:

1. You can add a single language to an existing pool at a time
2. You can add a pool to another pool, but the sum of both must not contain the same language twice
3. You can only remove a single language from a pool at a time

Just as with wiki pages, all link transactions have to be logged, so they can be easily reverted:

change      existing pool before change   old pool ID   new pool ID
+ro         en:Main Page de:Hauptseite    -             1

From a user point of view, you would have an additional box in the sidebar like this:

 _________
| English |
| Deutsch |
|______+/-|

And the "+/-" screen would look as follows:

 Link pool for: en:Main Page
 ____________________________
| en:Main Page             | |
| de:Hauptseite            |^|  
|                          |^|
|                          | |
|__________________________|_| 

[Save]

As you save this list, the additions and removals are processed one by one and stored in the transaction log. As noted, if, by adding a link, you join an existing pool of links, all the links in that pool would be added to the list.

In other words, if I set up a new Wikipedia in Elvish, I only have to add a single link, for example to English, and my page will be in the central pool of links between Main Pages.

The advantage of this pool system vs. other centralization models is that it doesn't give preference to any single language. I could have pools, for example, just among Scandinavian languages. This schema can also be extended relatively easily to cover both interlanguage and interproject links (where, however, in the case of interproject links, one would like to have some rule of precedence where a link to a local sister project would be preferred to a foreign one).

This is definitely something we need. InterWiki bots are not a solution, they're a workaround. Magnus Manske hacked a central interlanguage link system together a while back, but it was never finished. I hope a developer will take this up soon, otherwise I'll recommend it to the Board for targeted development.--Eloquence 22:54, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Interesting concept. It is, in fact, a combination of what the interwiki bots are doing right now, plus my proposal to make them work more efficiently, plus some sort of reference link as proposed by Elly.

I never said the interwiki bots are a general solution to the interwiki problem, nor that the processing could not be moved to the server side. The only thing to keep in mind is that there are unequal redirects, and pages that are split at different moments, so the interwikilinks are not static.

As things are right now, the interwiki bots, if not wasting time and bandwidth to do the simple autonomous edits that could more efficiently be done on the server side, are a very good tool to keep the interwiki links up to date. If the system is to be replaced by another system, you should keep in mind the links are not static, but dynamic, and if it is not possible for any Wikipedian to add, modify, or repair broken interwiki links, the advantage at the beginning will soon be lost. It is an illusion to think the system will run without any maintenance from real people.

Quistnix 06:58, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand this concept yet. Are these pools to be defined on every page, or is this on a higher level? I could imagine this groups the long lists of interwiki links into related languages (Asian, Latin, Scandinavian, Eastern europe, English etc), but I could also see a need for a group of major wikis (English+German+Japanese+French+Swedish+Dutch+Polish++). Would that be possible? HenkvD 07:48, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Dogs

I have a slightly different version of the dogs articles, that I might help people make up their minds:

• Language 1: Dogs are animals that live with people, as company, as guards, or to pull cars.
• Language 2: Dogs are working animals that guard or pull cars.
• Language 3: Dogs are house animals that live with people as pets or guards.
• Language 4: Dogs are descendants of wolves, and are still very good fighters.

Asking for uneven links to be handled differently is fine, but I expect all links are in a way uneven. How do you recognise it requires special handling. How do you recognise an edit has made special handling necessary? Mysha (nl)

I do not see the point here. With interwiki links it is about what the article is about. When there are articles about dogs, they are linked (current practice and this stays the practice). That there is a difference of emphasis in these articles is inmaterial. When new articles start to exist the links may need to be reassessed. GerardM 05:43, 5 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Sisterlinks project

I have started a sisterlinks project which aims to collect links to all articles on all sisterprojects. The collection of links is stored on a central place, typically on Commons.

See commons:Template talk:Sisterlinks for the details.

This project is not a replacement for interwiki links, but hopefully temporary until sisterprojects are linked via a proper interwiki links as described in A step further. HenkvD 15:46, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Interwiki graphs

See Interwiki graphs for complex interwiki graphs, like the picture below. HenkvD 19:44, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Controversy

with the change from a language page to an interwiki page, we need to create a new universal language not dependant upon the other languages

yet another proposal for interlanguage linking

Note: I posted this on Talk:Multilingual MediaWiki, but maybe it rather belongs here. Note that my proposal assumes that articles include metadata tables. --Mkill 12:49, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree with other proposals that it is too messy to include the interlanguage link (join tag) in the normal text. This solution will most likely create not linked lists but bowls of spaghetti.

So my suggestion is to save the interlanguage link within the page's metadata, that is, add entries "joined to" and "joined by" in the Languages table. Note that a page can only be either joined to a single other page or joined by a number of pages in a different language each.

So, how are these metadata edited?

Put a link reading "edit" under the interwiki-link box. Clicking this link opens a special page, which displays the current interlanguage linking of the page. So, for de:London, this might look like:

en:London

fr:Londres

ja:ロンドン

pl:Londyn

ru:Лондон

Meaning: the German page is joined to en:London, which is not joined to any other page but joined by a number of pages in other languages. Note that the German page's metadata only includes the link to en, while the other information is gained from the metadata of the english page.

To join another page to this ring, say, fi:Lontoo, open the page, click edit under its interwiki box on the side frame, and click "join to other page" there. Select a language and a page name. If you would try to join fi:Lontoo to de:London, the software would automaticly detect that this page is joined to en:London, and add "joined to:en:London" in the finnish page and "joined by:fi:Lontoo" in the english page.

Thus, the software would keep the rings clean.

Special cases

Moving a page: If a page is moved, the metadata of pages joined to/by it need to be updated.

Deleting a page: If a page that is joined to a different page is deleted, the "joined by" entry in the corresponding page needs to be deleted, too. If a page that is joined by other pages is deleted, all pages it was joined by will instead be joined to the page in the top of the list of it's "joined by"-pages.

Example: If en:London was deleted, all other pages about London would be joined to "fr:Londres" instead.

Joining a second page in an existing language: Imagine a user would, for example, try to join de:Paris to en:London. The software should display a message:

en:London is already joined by de:London. Do you wish to replace that article by de:Paris? Yes / Cancel

Adding rings: Assume there were two rings, a page en:London with fr, de, ru and ja linking to it and fi:Lontoo with no and sv linking to fi. If a user would join fi:Lontoo to en:London in this case, another message should be displayed:

Join all pages that are linked here to en:London too? Yes / No / Cancel

If yes is answered, fi, no and sv will be joined to en. If no is answered, fi will be joined to en and no will become the new hub, with sv linking to no.

--Mkill 12:35, 30 July 2006 (UTC)