Help talk:Interlanguage links/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

• Help talk:Interlanguage links/Archive 1

More than one interwiki from the same language?

Is there a way to have more than one interwiki from the same language? For example, the English List of Sailor Moon video games is made to cover all the video games created for Sailor Moon, but over on fr:, they have their own articles, fr:Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon and fr:Sailor Moon (jeu vidéo). Thanks for any help. -Malkinann (talk) 00:19, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

No, this is not possible, It would create a conflict. You can only link the summarized articles against each other and the specific articles to the corresponding articles. This means that you can't even put a single link to a language when the scope of the article there is different. By the way: in some languages you have both: summarized articles and articles to specific games/books/movies. --JonnyJD (talk) 10:46, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Link to latin script variant of Kazakh Language Wikipedia Main Page ?

The Kazakh language Wikipedia is written in three versions: with cyrilic, latin and arabic alphabets. You can switch among them by clicking their respectives tabs on top of the page. I need to provide an interwiki link to the Main Page of the Kazakh Language Wikipedia but the default [[:kk:]] code gives me the cyrillic version and I want the latin script version of it [1]. How can I do this ? --InfoCan (talk) 18:10, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Bots should not remove links

I propose that bots should not be allowed to remove interlanguge links (except perhaps in certain special cases, like two links to the same language on the same page).

Reason: a bot cannot possibly decide whether a link is useful or not. Only a human (with a reasonable understanding of both relevant languages) can make the decision. At the moment it seems that some bots (e.g. PipepBot, with whose owner I have tried to discuss this matter), delete links on the basis of some algorithm (maybe something like: if en:A links to de:B and de:B links to en:C, then delete the link to de:B on en:A). I don't believe that such an algorithm can ever be reliable, because:

• these algorithms seem to assume one-to-one correspondence between articles in different languages;
• there is not in fact such a correspondence, and the links structure should be sufficiently flexible to allow for that;
• even if we did insist on one-to-one linking (which is not agreed policy as far as I can tell), a bot would not be able to tell which is the wrong link, e.g. in the example above it might be the link on the de:B page which is wrong.

Even humans I think need to be urged not to be too officious in deleting inexact links, which are often more helpful than no link at all. --Kotniski (talk) 11:22, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

My bot PipepBot is running pywikipedia interwiki bot. It never deletes interwiki links automatically. Every time the bot sees a problem it asks me, and I decide what to do. --Pipep (talk) 20:11, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I discussed this topic a year ago already. We NEED an exact one-one relationship if we want to be able to interchange interwikilinks in different pages. We need to do that automatically, because this is the only chance to maintain that many interwikilinks in that many different languages. Nobody can speak all these languages to check them manually so we have to be strict about the relationsship. Everything else is going to lead to interwiki conflicts. The bad part about these is not, that these are inaccurate in 1 or 2 languages. The bad part is that no bot can update these links anymore because it is not clear how they relate to each other.
I understand that you want everything to be flexible, but then everything has to be handmade. Do you want to edit interwikilinks in 10 or 15 different languages on 10 or 15 wikis? You would have to to do that for EVERY article. The 1-1 relationship is not a restriction because we are not smart enough to write better bots. This is a restriction we have because of the underlying logic. Unless we have bots able to read the content in the article, but then we could create the whole wikipedia automatically from content stored somewhere. Plus: Unless you show me a concept that would work without 1-1 relationsships and I can't prove that it won't. On the other hand I don't feel like writing a proof of my concept because this is somewhat more timeconsuming than just proving that something doesn't work, but I guess it was done somewhere already, maybe for an equivalent problem.
You are definetely right that a bot shouldn't decide what's the wrong link to remove (if there is a conflict). However, if you see a bot removing a link this could also mean that a human gave the order to do so. In that case it is only semiautomatic and it can really help in solving conflicts. If that deletion was wrong then the person solving the conflict was wrong and people should discuss that. I am not that active solving conflicts at the moment, but if anybody has a question are needs a third opinion: tell me and I will have a look since I am still interested in the topic. --JonnyJD (talk) 23:45, 25 March 2008 (UTC) I also tried to explain why the deletion in question was correct and necessary here: it:Discussioni_utente:Pipep#PipepBot
Please have a look also at #Interlanguage_content_is_sometimes_a_partial_match. This also deals with basically the same topic. --JonnyJD (talk) 00:11, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I see the issue, but one possible solution which springs to mind is this: instead of deleting (without replacement) a link to a partial match, just add a comment after it in the wikitext, something like

[[ja:XXX]]< !-- partial match -- >

Then program the bots not to promulgate such links further, and to replace them automatically when they get a good match; i.e. from the bot's point of view the link is effectively deleted, but for the human user it remain available until something better comes along.--Kotniski (talk) 10:02, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I work a lot with iw links, but only manually - i just never tried running a bot, and in any case i have to think for myself too often to let a bot decide.

I have a very strong opinion about having one-to-one relationships whenever possible. When it is not possible, i prefer not to have a link at all.

I am not not against bots, like some people. They are doing a fantastic job compensating for what i consider as a bug: different versions of Wikipedia have almost zero coordination on what articles and categories they should include and what should their structure be. It's not perfect, but for me it's as good as it gets, and all in all, it's probably the most viable compromise for people who want the Wikipedia in their language be an independent community.

AFAIK, bots delete a link when they identify that an article was deleted in the other Wikipedia. That is a good thing, and that should make people consider deleting that article in their Wikipedia too - or, if they think that the subject of that article does deserve to be written about, to go the extra mile to that other Wikipedia and propose its re-creation.

People raise an eyebrow when i do such things through embassies in foreign Wikipedias, but that should happen more. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 15:27, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, I basically agree with everything you're saying, except the bit about preferring no link at all to a non-1-to-1 link. Can you expand on that (i.e. explain why)?--Kotniski (talk) 16:13, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Truth is one. In a perfect world, all Wikipedias have the same information in different languages. (Unlike some people, i don't think that in a perfect all people speak one language; linguistic diversity is A Good Thing.) If the information is the same, then it's structure and organization should be the same.

That was the philosophical part. The practical part is that it is a nightmare to maintain, for both bots and humans. I often encounter situations of this kind.

In reality i very rarely delete links brutally. Usually i bring one Wikipedia in harmony with the other. Sometimes it means that i write a new article, sometimes i restructure the categories, sometimes i split and merge existing articles. That's something that bots cannot do.

I mostly harmonize between Hebrew and English Wiki's, but i also lurk on ru, uk, ca, it, es and a few others. (It's a terrific way to learn languages, too.) Sometimes the Hebrew one is better, sometimes the English one. Nothing is holy. As in nearly all things in Wikipedia, BE BOLD is the number one rule and nearly always it works wonderfully. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:54, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I hope you read the two discussion links I gave you further up. You can do some manual partial match, but you shouldn't do that as a normal interwikilink. Just include it in a decent part of the article if it really IS that important even if it is only a partial match. (prepend another ":" in the link) Then it is a connection, but it is also made clear that this is NOT a 2-way connection because it is no 1-1 link.

The suggestion you made is somewhat errorprone with the exact formatting, but the real problem is, that the user can still get lost, because he has no defined way back and this should be possible with all the interwikis shown on the left side. Therefore, just make it a link in the text, if it is important or leave it if there is no direct connection. If we start doing partial matches officially then we end up with a lot of wild links to everywhere. (everybody would argue that there is some relation or one part that actually is discussed in both articles) --JonnyJD (talk) 18:45, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, I see I'm in the minority here, but I still don't agree. Surely the ability to go to some relevant article in one's own/other language is more important than the fact of always automatically going back to where you came from (which you can do anyway using the browser's "Back" button). And everyone's used to finding the interlanguage links where they are - users aren't going to start trawling through articles looking for additional inline ones. As far as I can see the suggestion I made above would solve the maintenance problem for bots. And I'm not proposing that more than one link to a particular language be allowed in any article, so the proliferation of "wild" links would remain firmly in check. --Kotniski (talk) 19:24, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

partial linking is very bad. interwiki bots do a very good job of propagating interwiki links. those bots do no actually add links. if en:X links to de:X and de:X links to sv:X. the bot adds sv to the en article and en to sv even knowing there is no direct link. Add in a few more languages and partial matchs become a quagmire. β^{_{command 2}} 23:53, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Have you looked at my suggestion above (the one about adding a comment in the wikitext after partial links)? As far as I can see it will solve this bot problem completely, while allowing humans to continue to see links which are likely to be useful to them.--Kotniski (talk) 08:58, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't believe that users will create clearly formatted entries so the bots can realize what type of interwikilink this is and do the right format for the right link (partial or complete). I don't want to offend anybody, but my experience shows that users quite often don't see the difference between partial matches and complete matches and having two formats makes this rather more complicated. Maybe I am wrong and users are quite aware of the surrounding issues. In this case we would need a new styleguideline for that and all the bots have to be rewritten BEFORE people add these partial links. So you should find a platform to discuss this with the bot-scripters and you will have to argue with them so they include that change. --JonnyJD (talk) 18:27, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't expect users to format these links either, but that isn't the point. The bots would add these comments, to exactly the links that they currently delete (except obviously links to non-existent or totally irrelevant articles, which would still be deleted). Of course there's a chance that editors will not understand the importance of the comments and delete them, but that can hardly be more of a problem than the situation we have now - where editors keep putting in reasonable links of the type the bots delete.

I agree of course that this would be best discussed with the bot-scripters - any idea where to find them?--Kotniski (talk) 16:10, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

We already had that topic. Bots DON'T delete links without user input. There is at least a user telling the bot what links to delete. It's not that it would work automatically. We have huge lists of interwiki conflicts that need to be solved and if you see that as the point when the comment gets inserted then it simply doesn't work. It will create more conflicts that need to be solved, because you encourage to use partial links. The only difference would be the way how conflicts get solved (changing link types rather than deletion), but we would have a lot more broken interwikis and still not enough people willing working on them. Having more of these is a must before we try to improve the complexity of the links imho. Have a look at at lists like this: de:Wikipedia:Interwiki-Konflikte. The list is not even near complete and you can work a while on fixing a single conflict..

I haven't found something better yet to reach scripters other than leaving a note on every bot owner or similar. --JonnyJD (talk) 18:16, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, I know bots are supposed not to delete links without user input. What I'm proposing is that, in cases where now the user (bot owner) gives the go-ahead for a delete, s/he should have a third option, namely "mark as partial match". Then the comment gets added (presumably the bot could do this, after the user clicks the button), and from then on that link is, from the bots' point of view, not there (well, they just have to remember to delete it if they find a better link in the same language). This does not affect the number of conflicts at all, for better or for worse, because regardless of whether the link is deleted or commented, the bots stop looking at it, so it can't possibly cause a conflict. However it does allow a potentially useful link to be retained for human users, who are the ones for whom we are presumably building this encyclopedia.--Kotniski (talk) 09:25, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

If you allow partial matches officially then more of these get added so you get more conflicts, because people start adding more partial matches because it "works" (not automatically) now. Changing rules also changes the editing behavior of people.

This is basically the same issue like deleting irrelevant articles. We do that to get higher quality articles (or interwikilinks) rather than just as many as we can get, because we don't have an infinite number of people working on wikipedia. Of course, this is one major disagreement between en.wiki and de.wiki (where I come from) --JonnyJD (talk) 10:21, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, I sort of see your point, but as far as I know there is no rule at the moment against adding partial matches (it's just a preference that bot owners try to impose), and indeed people do add such links, hence the large number of conflicts. In fact, under my suggestion, the rules could be changed to specifically require that people adding partial links mark them as such using a standard comment; that might actually reduce the number of conflicts that the bots and their owners have to sort out.--Kotniski (talk) 10:41, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

A proposal: language disambiguation pages

(Refactored: This discussion started as a subsection of an old discussion titled "How to deal with multiple articles in another language." from 2006.) --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 16:38, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, you have to consider a most general case. There are lots of situations where a term in a language corresponds to two completely different objects or concepts which are called using different terms in another language. For example, Helmet in English is used for both Combat Helmet and Sport Helmet. In Italian, combat helmet is called elmo if we refer to ancient one, and elmetto if we refer to the modern one. Sport helmet is called casco. Currently the Henglish article Helmet refers to the Italian one Casco, whereas both Casco and Elmo refers to Helmet. This asymmetry is a problem. In dictionaries, this problems are managed by using numbers (1), (2)... and so forth. I do not propose that but we need a similar mechanism to manage interlanguage connections. A solution might be to create a specific disambiguation page to manage one-to-many relationships. Differently from the traditional disambiguation page, which is used to disambiguate between different meanings of the same term in the same language, this page would be used as an hub to redirect the reader to several possible translations of the same term. How to implement? A way could be to use the original term prefixed by a symbol. For example, if I add [[it:@Helmet]] to an article, the Italian link will take me to a page where Helmet (English) is disambiguate in the three different terms casco, elmo, and elmetto. Of course this page should not be searcheable as the other wiki pages, since it is not expected to be reached directly, but only thru a language link. It is a Special page. That would be solve a LOT of misunderstandings.--Dejudicibus (talk) 09:50, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Good idea! --Dedda71 (talk) 10:38, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I found a way to make it simpler. Let us create in every Wikipedia a new namespace callde X (that is, cross — do not consider it a term but a symbol, an icon, so that it can be understood everywhere). We need a namespace to avoid that the disambigiation pages be indexed by search. When a term "A-term" in language "aa" has more translations in language "bb", that is, "B1-term", "B2-term", "B3-term"..., we just put in the "A-term" article the link [[bb:X:A-term]] which takes to a X:A-term disambiguation page containing the links to all "Bn-term" articles. X:A-term page is not in the base namespace since it refers to a foiregn language for bb.wikipedia.org, and it can be reached only through the language link. Comments? Questions? Suggestions?--Dejudicibus (talk) 10:47, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

This seems very complicated for a such little problem. The current system is not perfect but works well. The details of translation are soon explicated on wiktionary. Cdlt, VIGNERON * ^discut. 11:59, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I do not think it is a little problem, not for any person in the world that speaks more than one language.--Dejudicibus (talk) 20:51, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Full suport to these ideas. The problem is real and deep. Interwiki links are a nightmare to sort out, there is often no solution with current system because terms in various languages do not cover the same meanings. We need a sort of multi-lingual disambiguation system. Whatever is the solution later used, the first step is to get aware of this problem. Jérôme (talk) 12:21, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I just can not undestand the need of this.

An Encyclopedia is about otpic, not words. So If a word have 3 meanings in English, en.wikipedia should have 3 articles. The 3 pages at it.wikipedia should have interlanguage link point ing to the right page at en.wikipedia. --ChemicalBit (talk) 13:58, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Not necessarily. Take the example given by Dejudicibus: a Helmet is helmet, whereas it's a military one or a sport helmet. These are 2 kinds of helmets, but still helmets. One could write 2 articles, of course, but writing a single one also make sense, why not. But here's the problem: in italian (apparently), these 2 kinds of helmet have different names and unless there is another word covering both kind of helmet, writing a single article on it.wikipedia is just not possible (well, eventually it's possible using redirection, but when you use 2 words to describe 2 kinds of helmets, you'll naturally write two articles). The problem isn't that there is 1 word with two meanings in one language and 2 words in another, the problem is that one language may have a more general word when another have several more specific words (and no word covering the general concept). In this case, the speakers of the first language would tend to write one article describing the different kind and the speakers of the other would tend to write an article for each kind. I already found other example with a similar problem but unfortunatelly I don't remember what it was. Polletfa (talk) 15:01, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I just found another example: tax. In french, you have fr:Impôt and fr:Taxe. Both are translated by 'tax' in english and 'Steuer' in german but it french 'taxe' and 'impôt' are not exactly the same (I don't quite understand the difference because it's kind of technical). There is also 'redevance': the english link is 'royalties' but it's probably false, because the most well-known 'redevance' in french is the 'redevance audiovisuel', which is in english the 'television licence'. So 'taxe', 'impôt', 'redevance' are several kinds of imposition or charges, but it is very difficult to find the word which translate exactly one or another in another language because this is a theme were every country has its own tradition, its own categorization, its own reglementation... Other example: 'droit' and 'loi' are both linked with 'law' in english but... 'loi ' and 'droit' are slightly different in french (even if very closely related). Actually I think that a lot of interwiki links on articles related to law are either mistakes or simplification. Polletfa (talk) 15:35, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Good example. I Italian too tax refers to two completely different concepts: tasse and imposte. So, if both Italian articles can refer to the single English one, which Italian article should be referred in the English article? You cannot choose one. In both cases it would be wrong.--Dejudicibus (talk) 20:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I got nightmares was when I tried to sort out interwiki links of Thatching. In English, the article is about crafstamanship. In French, the article is fr:chaume, about the vegetal material (type of straw). But the French article fr:Chaumière (the sort of house has a roof made of the straw) has also an interwiki link to thatching, which is the closest in thematic, because there is no equivalent article on English Wikipedia for that kind of house. One could use cottage, because the French word chaumière often means a sort of cottage house, but if you do so, you will change of interwiki loop, and switch to "holiday house" series of words, where you notice that German Wikipedia has one article named de:Cottage (Wohngebäude) and one named de:Ferienhaus, with interwiki links randomly pointing to the cottage/chaumière mess.

ChemicalBit, you are surely right, if there are two meanings we shoud logically make two articles. But you cannot "force" ten small wikipedias to make one or several articles just because English, German or whatever big Wikipedias need a specific way to cut information. Sometimes according to the language it might not even make sense to make two separate articles, if the concepts are understood as just the same in that language. Jérôme (talk) 16:20, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I have a lot of experience manually sorting out such cases. I wrote a script that finds them. I didn't operate it on en.wiki, but it has been quite fruitful in the Hebrew Wikipedia.

My most important conclusion: if two articles are different enough for language X, then they are different enough for language Y, even if in language Y both have the same name.

For example, in Hebrew Glacier and Iceberg are the same word, but we noticed that in most languages the words are different, and we realized that these are quite different things, even though both involve ice. So we split the article in the Hebrew Wikipedia. Basically, encyclopedic facts are the same, even if languages are different.

So no, an "interwiki disambiguation" is not a good idea. There are only two options in hard interwiki cases: To harmonize article structure between two Wikipedias by splitting or merging - a thing which i did many times -, or if that is too hard - not to add interwiki links to the problematic article at all.

For more information about the script that finds such hard cases automatically, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Interlanguage Links/Ideas from the Hebrew Wikipedia. If you would like to implement this in Wikipedia in your language, please let me know and i shall gladly help you. I already implemented it by myself in Russian, Esperanto and Occitan, and i am almost ready to implement it in Spanish, French and Nynorsk. Any other language should be very easy (except, in the meantime, English - en.wiki is huge and poses several technical problems, on which i am working right now). --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 16:26, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

(conflicted) I agree with Dejudicibus. Probably we need a different namespace, made ad hoc for redirecting thoose peculiar cases. --Roberto Segnali all'Indiano 16:29, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Nope. A new namespace for this will add technical complexity, and will not solve the problem.

One can say that "a helmet is a helmet", but if two full articles can be written in Italian about two different types of helmets, then two full articles can be written in English and in any other language. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 16:43, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Amir, it is not a matter of two different kind of helmet. The term helmet in English refers to two completely different objects in Italian. And this is true for a lot of other terms. For example, you use home and house to identify two different concepts. We use just casa. No difference. And thiese are the simplest cases. Glass is the transparent material to make windows in English, as well as the object used to drink. But in Italian glass is vetro in the first case and bicchiere in the second one, even if non made by glass. There is no realtion between the two concepts in Italian.--Dejudicibus (talk) 21:11, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

The easiest solution would be to allow multiple interwiki to the same language. Id est, having in Helmet both "[[it:Elmo]]" and [[it:Casco]]" interwiki. In the interwiki coloumn that would result in something like:

• ...
• Bahasa Indonesia
• Italiano: Casco
• Italiano: Elmo
• Nederlands

... and so on. But this possibility could be misunderstood and improperly used by many users. Quatar (talk) 19:22, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

It is technically allowed and it is, indeed, improperly used by many users. This help page discourages it - "links from any page (most notably articles) in one Wikipedia language to the same subject in another Wikipedia language" - but it is not massively enforced (unlike, for example, deletion of unjustified fair use images or unsourced data). I often remove such links, doing my best to improve article structure on the way, but sometimes it is hard to judge what should be removed and what should be left, so i unhappily leave them as they are.

AFAIK, the standard interwiki bot software (see meta:Using the python wikipediabot) removes double links when it encounters them, but i'm not sure about its exact algorithm. In any case, this bot is unlikely to encounter a page with duplicate links without being specifically requested to do so. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:21, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I understand that human intervention from the bot operator is required before the bot removes links (though there may be exceptions to this). I actually like the idea of disambiguation pages (whether in a separate namespace or not) being used to solve this problem. Ideally every Wikipedia would have exactly corresponding articles, but of course this is far from being the case in practice, and so we need a more complex interlanguage linking system to take account of the complex relations involved.--Kotniski (talk) 15:24, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Often, as Amir E. Aharoni notes above, these ambiguities can indeed be resolved by choosing more accurate link targets, or, if that can't be done, may indicate that some pages should be split. Taking a closer look at the examples you mentioned (while acknowledging that you meant them as examples of a broader phenomenon), for instance, I note that we already have separate English articles for Glass (material) and Glass (drinkware) (which actually redirect to Glass and Drinkware, and indeed link to it:Vetro and it:Bicchiere, respectively). Similarly, our Helmet article indeed properly links to it:Casco, as it should, since the two articles mainly discuss the same thing. We also have a separate Combat helmet article, which currently has no Italian interlanguage link, but should probably link to it:Elmetto (and vice versa). Meanwhile, I suspect that the most appropriate interwiki link target for it:Elmo would be Great helm, though, not actually speaking Italian, it's hard for me to be sure. As for Home and House, they currently link to it:Residenza and it:Casa respectively: this may be a reasonable arrangement, particularly as Residence in English is currently a disambiguation page, but it does seem (based on my limited understanding of the language) that there is some content at it:Casa which really discusses the concept known in English as "Home" and maybe ought to be split off or possibly merged with another existing article. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:02, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

See also m:A_newer_look_at_the_interwiki_link. --Nemo bis (talk) 20:31, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, this problem is a little bit more complicated. The fact that a certain word in language A can be translated in two different ways in language B related to two completely different objects is just a case. There are other situations where the problem is not related to language but to culture. In addition, there is a more significant problem to face: there are several dozens Wikipedia today. If I write a new article in Italian, I have to update a lot of pages in a lot of different languages to add that link, and I have to search in a lot of different wikipedia to get the name of the article in those other languages. Sometimes the list of links of various localized articles is even longer than the article itself. But let us suppose we keep in a single page all the translations, that is, a central hub. All the pages links the hub. Maintaining all links would be easier. You just see Other languages in the navigation bar and you go to a page where you find all of them, and you may also have disambiaguation comments too.--Dejudicibus (talk) 21:05, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

The "hub" solution is excellent, and the code for it is already written: it is described m:A_newer_look_at_the_interwiki_link and it already works as a test. I tried it, i found no problem with it, and i think that it should be enabled on all Wikipedias.

I am glad that this discussion generates such interest. Ilmari Karonen's comment above demonstrates that it is quite possible to solve many cases of this kind. My script for finding such duplicates helps finding such cases, but i'm working with it almost completely by myself - this is an open invitation to join me in this interesting task! --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 08:33, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Interlanguage extension

There's a new MediaWiki extension that may make the maintenance of interlanguage links, often called "interwiki", much easier.

See here for the relevant discussions:

• on meta: meta:Talk:A newer look at the interlanguage link
• on the Wikitech-L mailing list: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-September/039472.html
• on Bugzilla: MediaZilla:15607

Your input is welcome. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:57, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Links to section

The current version says: "For [...] inverse link from section to article, use inline interlanguage links". I strongly disagree with this, as it doesn't work like this is practice.

It seems that the bots' handling of interlanguage links to sections has improved lately; for example, the ugly character numbers in the section names are gradually being replaced by real section names. But problems still remain. AFAIK, bots cannot detect a change in the name of the target section. Also, the problem of linking back from the section to other languages is still not solved. Consider Order of the Phoenix (organisation): In the Hebrew Wikipedia it is a part of an article called "Harry Potter: organizations" (a good idea, which other Wikipedias should consider!), but many Wikipedias have a separate article about it and link to the section about Order of the Phoenix in the merged Hebrew article. Now where should the merged Hebrew article link?

There's no practical and accepted way to add interlanguage links from a section. That's why i'd rather prohibit interlanguage links to sections completely across all Wikipedias. Instead, the different Wikipedias should consider harmonizing their article structures. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 22:05, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

When to NOT link to other language wikipedias

Is it ever appropriate to remove a link to another language wikipedia if some editors feel it is biased? Specifically, at Talk:2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict#Arabic interwiki there is a debate going on where some believe the Arabic Wikipedia is biased on this subject and should not be linked to. Any comments would be greatly appreciated. Bsimmons666 (talk) ^Friend? 19:19, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Nope. If editors know the foreign language well enough to understand that the article is biased, then they can also fix the article and make it appropriately NPOV, can't they?

(N.B.: I'm Israeli and i don't have any problem with links to the Arabic Wikipedia, or to any other.) --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:44, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure that that logic holds – you can understand a language but still not know enough about a particular topic to know whether it's biased. However I don't think we're vouching for the neutrality of articles we link to in other Wikipedias, so I wouldn't remove such links except in extreme cases (e.g. if the target contains libels or copyright violations).--Kotniski (talk) 08:53, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Different Wikis, different takes, and that's just the way it is. If you're able, editing the second language article is the way to go, because deleting interwiki links is interfering with a Wiki feature and won't go over well. RomaC (talk) 15:48, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Interwiki sorting order

What exacly rules do you use by sorting interwiki? I suggested new sorting order for Polish Wikipedia: 1, 2, 3, but I don't know the reason of oryginal sorting order. Or mayby you would like to use new sorting order. BartekChom (talk) 20:57, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

See m:Interwiki_sorting_order. Joriki (talk) 18:23, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Links to sections of articles

I do not understand why this page recommends not to make interwiki links to sections of articles in other languages. It is my impression that this is indeed the normal practice when the Wikipedia in one language have collected several items in one article which have separate articles in other languages. (You may not see this so often here at the English Wikipedia as it often here you have the larger articles which cover several items - that could for example be descriptions of the characters in some fictional world).

What are the problems you see with such interwiki links? They help find the descriptions of the items in the other language, and they cause no problem for interwiki bots - or anybody else as far as I know. So why not recommend the use here also? Byrial (talk) 15:13, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

strange characters in interwiki

I noticed the strange looking interwiki links at Hydrofluoric acid, done in this diff. Should that be replaced with normal characters? Ark25 (talk) 18:46, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Looks like an accident (the same IP also did this). Help:Multilingual support#Unicode says that these accidents shouldn't happen no matter how old your browser is, but that doesn't seem to be quite correct. I can't imagine anyone intentionally doing these changes. —JAO • T • C 19:00, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Best place to ask for adding interlanguage links for locked pages ?

where shall I ask things like this? Template talk:Geology-stub; also need to add at Template:Judaism-stub the :ro link: ro:Format:Ciot-iudaism. Ark25 (talk) 01:39, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest doing it on the talk page of the locked template. Write {{editprotected}} above your request, which will get the attention of a admin.--Kotniski (talk) 08:07, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

User who adds interlanguage link that don't exist

Please see Special:Contributions/Lynntyler. I have doubt about the usefulness of his/her contribution. --Inertia-japonica (talk) 23:36, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Anyone want to interwiki talk pages?

I do! Rich Farmbrough, 08:52, 7 September 2009 (UTC).

I would support linking actual talk pages automatically to the same languages, to which the main article links.

Discussion pages, such as WP:AFD are already sometimes linked to other languages, but not very systematically. I'm trying - very slowly - to improve this using the tools described at WP:WPIW/HE. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 06:01, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Redlinks

Resolved

There are an awful lot of redlinks in this help page. Is that intentional? --Redrose64 (talk) 18:36, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

resolved - they're blue now. Assume some kind of server malfunction in Miami, Fla. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:04, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Particular tasks for languages

For a few languages there are pages, which try to list problems with interlanguage links to en.wp. They are mostly outdated and not updated systematically, but probably should be kept. If anything, i shall try to update them one day according to the procedure described at WP:WPIW/HE. In the meantime the links to them can be removed from the main page. Here's the section:

For a few other Wikipedia languages, there are lists of pages where links may be needed. For example, the English article may have a Spanish link, but the corresponding Spanish article might be missing a link to English. Most of these lists are outdated.

• Wikipedia:Interlanguage links/Dutch
• Wikipedia:Interlanguage links/Esperanto
• Wikipedia:Interlanguage links/French
• Wikipedia:Interlanguage links/German
• Wikipedia:Interlanguage links/Polish
• Wikipedia:Interlanguage links/Spanish

For more information on working with other language Wikipedias, see Wikipedia:Embassy and Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination.

Regards, --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 05:56, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Interwiki links issues

Some things that has come up in relation to Alph Bot (see User talk:Alph Bot#Problem) that I could use some clarity on:

• Are we limited to only one English language page pointing to a page in another language's Wiki?
• Is there a problem with Set Indexes that are in the format of an article pointing to dab pages?
• Is there a problem with a page pointing to a section of a page in another language where the section is the only place where the topic is covered in that language?
• Do we have any thing on other Wikis, or here for that matter, on whether redirects can be set up solely for interwiki links?

Thanks

- J Greb (talk) 22:55, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

I think your questions are very pertinent. I came here for the same kind of reasons (see below comment). For Q 1) and 3), I would say: 1) No, I don't think it's a problem. BTW, there are already many cross-inter-language-wiki-link referencing. Example, 「透明」(= transparency) and「透明度」(= transparency level) both link to「 Transparent 」, through it's sometimes used to mean「Invisible」as in 透明人間/Invisible man (Notice the first 2 caracters are the same as 透明/Transparent). 「Invisible」is linkless and I don't where I could link it. 3) That's a good idea, I think the more there are the better. Though it would be important that the tool tip show the section title and not the page title. Can that be done? － Cy21 ➜ discuss 20:02, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

These things are not absolutely bad, and it's true that they already exist, but it is a nightmare to maintain them. So it's better not to use them. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:12, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

How can this be so complicated?

How the heck do I link from the Spanish Wikibooks article on soy beans to Polish Wiktionary article on dog food? What about from a commons image to Swedish wikipedia article on lung cancer? No wonder there are so few links. Please make it very simple. Thanks. 85.77.170.127 (talk) 12:07, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Discuss Language Interwiki choice of word?

I noticed that sometimes there were 2 articles that lead 1 article in an other language... This of course because, most of the time, for languages with distant roots, translations don't go 1=1 but more 1=0.9 OR 1=1.1 (OR a phrase)

So I was wondering if there was a page to discuss this kind of language specific problem? Is there a spacial page for each language group? (Japnese ←→ English) I've searched but haven't found any. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cy21 (talk • contribs) 10:29, 6 March 2010 (UTC) edited － Cy21(talk)

Template:Comp

FYI, {{Comp}} has been nominated for deletion. 65.94.253.16 (talk) 06:09, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Navbox template interwiki problem

I started adding German interwiki links to some aircraft and aircraft engine manufacturer navboxes Template:Rolls-Royce aeroengines as an example (the German equivalent is 'Vorlage:Navigationsleiste Rolls-Royce Flugzeugtriebwerk') and adding the English links to the German templates. A German editor spotted a problem and asked me to stop, which I did. I could not see the problem initially but it appears that when clicking on the language link in the left side bar of an article that this directs to the company navbox template and not the article. Is there anyway around this problem or is it something that is being caused at 'the other end'?!! Cheers Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 19:36, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Same problem on wiki:it, have undone my related edits there. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 19:45, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

If you put the interwiki links within the <noinclude> ... </noinclude> then they should only appear on the template's page, and not pages which utilize the template. See Wikipedia:Template documentation for more info. I've done this for Template:Rolls-Royce aeroengines so you can take a look at that for an example. TDL (talk) 06:28, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Great, thanks. I will try it later. Cheers Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 18:27, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Old English

I don't know if this is the right place for this query. I have noticed that interlanguage links at the left side of an article seem to have each language named in its own language (Deutsch, Français, Polski, etc.) except for Old English, where it says "Anglo-Saxon". (See, for example, the interlanguage links at the left side of Beowulf.) The language was called "Anglo-Saxon" a hundred years ago. Scholars tend to call it "Old English" now. Regardless, if the Wikipedia practice is to have "Deutch" rather than "German" for the linked word that takes us to a particular article in German, and "Français" rather than "French" for us to click on to take us to a particular article in French, then putting ang at the bottom of an article should give us the word "Englisc" to click on, not "Anglo-Saxon".

How can this be fixed? Girlwithgreeneyes (talk) 22:03, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

You should probably enter a new bug on Wikimedia Bugzilla and wait until someone fixes it... --Filemon (talk) 07:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. I have done that. Girlwithgreeneyes (talk) 10:45, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Interlanguage Bots

If bots automatically handle interlanguage links (like if A connects to B and B connects to C, then A connects to C), then is there a way for those bots to sort alphabetically by the two-letter language code? It would make navigating between languages a lot easier. InMooseWeTrust (talk) 13:39, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Template:Iw

FYI, {{Iw}} has been nominated for deletion. 70.29.210.155 (talk) 04:16, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Interlanguage bots do not recognize deliberate human removal of errors

I recently worked on Merope (mythology), which was very sloppily linked to a lot of interlanguage articles, most of which correspond to Merope or Merope (Pleiades). I carefully removed the interlanguage links that do not belong, but three different bots have come along and re-added them.

My question: Shouldn't these bots have to analyze and understand that if human editors are removing and reverting interlanguage additions, they must not be re-added?

I know I could go into all of those sister Wikipedias and correct the problem by hand, but, in principle, it is galling that I would have to go to such lengths to defend a correct edit to English Wikipedia against an onslaught of bots programmed to reintroduce the error. Wareh (talk) 13:24, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

{{Bots|deny=…}} is your friend. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 14:05, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I had no idea of this tool. Admittedly a blunt instrument, but anyone who dislikes its kludginess can always fix the problem! Wareh (talk) 14:27, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

interlanguage links to Commons

I was looking for the information on how to add interlanguage links from wikipedias to commons. For example, I just moved Template:Str sub to commons: I added interlanguage link "[[en:Template:Str sub]]" to commons:Template:Str sub but would like to also add an interlanguage link pointing from Template:Str sub to commons. What is the correct syntax? --Jarekt (talk) 14:42, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

There isn't one. Commons isn't a different language - it's a separate project. See the lead section of H:ILL, para. 2 "The interlanguage link feature works also on Commons, and produces links to the Wikipedias. This is not reciprocal: a link from a Wikipedia to Commons is an in-page link.". You could put it in a "see also" section:

See also

• commons:Template:Str sub

--Redrose64 (talk) 14:55, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Do you know if this is a bug or a feature? In other words, was that a decision to allow links only in one direction, or the reason is that nobody thought yet about allowing that? I realize that I can use "see also" but that is not where I look for interlanguage links. --Jarekt (talk) 21:06, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

I've just suggested the feature be enabled at WP:VPR.  An optimist on the run! 09:09, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Template:MultiLink

Template:MultiLink seems broken to me. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beta_Negative_Decay.svg All it is producing is red links wether referenced in wikipedia or the commons. I'm clueless about this sort if stuff, my apologies if I'm pointing out something irrelevant. TimL (talk) 17:25, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

As far as I can see, it produces two links: one on commons (red in your example) and one on the English Wikipedia, under the blue superscripted string "en". I think it's pointless and recommend the conventional [[:en:Feynman diagram|Feynman diagram]] giving Feynman diagram. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:03, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Alphabetization

It appears that the Wikipedia standard is to alphabetize the interlanguage links. But how to alphabetize? Is German alphabetized as German or Deutsch? Is Hebrew alphabetized as Hebrew or Ivrit? The answer to this question should be on the this article page, and in other appropriate locations in the manual of style. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:08, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

It is, see H:ILL#Sorting. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:20, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I found the answer while you were replying. A further question: Does Wikipedia have bots that automatically re-alphabetize the links, or is this maintained by human effort? —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:27, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

There are lots of bots that maintain interlanguage links, and most of these will add new ILLs at suitable places, as here. Some of them will also sort existing ILLs into what they consider the proper order when adding another ILL, as here, but I don't know of any bots that sort the ILLs when there are no actual changes being made to the ILLs. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:38, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

I've now found one which sorts when modifying an existing ILL - see here. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:43, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Nearly equivalent

What exactly is meant by "nearly equivalent", as mentioned in this Help article? A firmer definition may be required. A discussion is taking place at Talk:Kosovo#Interwikis which hinges on this point - please contribute. Regards, Bazonka (talk) 08:21, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Help

I think this tool is very limited, has recently an article of Mount Teide in urdu language, yet does not bind to the other languages ​​though below copy the links in other languages. I mean, in the article in English, Spanish or Chinese (for example) do not see the link to the article in Urdu. Please if anyone can help me would give a million thanks.--79.152.179.236 (talk) 19:48, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Done. Added ur:ٹیڈ to Teide. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:44, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Thank you very much, Michael, but still missing the urdu language link in all other languages ​​(French, Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Japanese ... etc). How do I automatically appears in all languages​​?. Thank you very much.--79.152.179.236 (talk) 08:54, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Normally, several bots go around and fill these links. It may take a while; see Help:Interlanguage links, User talk:Yurik/Interwiki Bot FAQ, Wikipedia:Bots/Status. You could visit the other-language Wikipedias and add the Urdu link yourself. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 10:19, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

No interlanguage links in mobile Wikipedia version

See subject. BPK (talk) 12:23, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

How do I link completely outside of a languages?

How do I link completely outside of a language? For instance, how would I link to [2] from another page on Wikisource? Banaticus (talk) 10:00, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

The same as you do within a language Wikipedia. To link: [[:Template:TopTenCircle]], to transclude a template: {{TopTenCircle}}. Why do you ask? Doesn't that work for you? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:35, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Do interlanguage bots work in template namespace?

I have added a number of langlinks to templates (notably {{ATC code A}}, {{ATC code B}} etc.) four days ago and hoped that a bot would add the backlinks from the foreign-language templates, but nothing has happened so far. Don't the bots work in template namespace? It would be rather tedious to do by hand. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 19:28, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

They do, but as with articles that have never previously had ILLs, it can take days or even weeks for the bots to notice that the template now has some ILLs. You might find it easier to check that you have a Unified login, then go to those other Wikipedias and edit the templates yourself. Bear in mind that when a template has a documentation page, the ILLs should be added to that (within <includeonly>...</includeonly>, like this), and not to the main template. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:15, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm not in a hurry. I'd rather wait than having to add links to 50+ pages. After all, the links have been missing for months or years ;-) --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 08:45, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

IW's in redirects?

What is our policy re. IW's in redirected pages? I've seen this done several places for good effect, but expect that it's not s.t. we'd want too much of. Or, since we say 'articles' in the plural, should we have both IW's on the same WP-en page?

There are a few cases I think it might be useful, but for all I know there's already agreement not to do this:

• We have an article 'history of (country) X from 1600–1700', while in language X the articles are 'history of X from 1600–1650' and 'history of X from 1650–1700'. Neither is closer than the other, so here maybe we want two IW's to WP-X.
• Article A in WP-A corresponds closely to article B in WP-B, and that in turn corresponds well to article C in WP-C, but A and C are not matches, and if we link from WP-A to WP-C, bots will start adding all sorts of inappropriate IW's. This might be a case where putting the IW's in a RD would help.
• Two related topics rd to our article, and for now readers in other WP's should be directed to it, but we might develop the RD's into articles. We could also place the IW's in the dab page.

— kwami (talk) 03:14, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Your last case about related topics is probably a good case to use redirects. The other two sound tricky; do you have concrete examples? When I merge articles, I sometimes leave interlanguage links in the article that becomes a redirect. I found the page meta:Interwiki conflicts interesting, although does require a bit of concentration to understand.

 I was wondering, is it better for English (specifically Ones' complement) to link to a foreign redirect (pt:Complemento para um, recently merged), or its target (pt:Representação de números com sinal#Complemento para um, a subtopic of English Signed number representations)? Vadmium (talk, contribs) 12:31, 18 June 2012 (UTC).

spans on iw links?

• reverted
• User talk:Wehwalt#IW links
• User talk:Hgrosser#spans on iw links?

I don't think this is appropriate. I also don't think it being inflicted on other wikis will be appreciated. Something to talk about *first*. Alarbus (talk) 02:20, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Capitalization of language names

Since a couple of days, many of the language names in the "in other languages" sidebar section are no longer capitalized: aragonés, brezhoneg, català, ..., while others remain capitalized as before: Afrikaans, Boarisch, Choctaw, .... If I'm not mistaken this is derived from the variable $coreLanguageNames defined in a Mediawiki file named Names.php (svn version). I assume the rationale is that in some languages language names (including the own language name) are not capitalized in running text: L'aragonés yera parlau por bellas 25.000 personas. However, also in these languages, all language names would tend to be capitalized in a list like we see in the sidebar. See for example the Aragonese Wikipedia. I think the change is not an improvement; it is better to capitalize the names also here like it used to be.  --Lambiam 18:56, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

More information at WP:VPT#MediaWiki 1.20wmf5 deployment complete. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:10, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

template from another language

how would it be possible to use a template from another language, e.g. to use "Meetup" as well on the french wikipedia? --ThurnerRupert (talk) 17:17, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Templates cannot be shared like that, I'm afraid. You would have to create an equivalent template at the French Wikipedia if it doesn't have one already. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:35, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Only 1?

Since when does the software display only one of several interlanguage links in an article when there are several? E.g. Amadeus (disambiguation) links to de:Amadeus and to de:Amadeus (Vorname), both of which link to the English article. Another example is Hübner, de:Hübner, de:Hübner (Familienname). In reverse, there's de:Alt (Stimmlage) which links to Alto and Contralto, both of which link to the German article. In all these examples, only the first interlanguage links is displayed. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:22, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

zh-min-nan typeface

The interlanguage links for Bân-lâm-gú (zh-min-nan) show up in a different typeface (for example, on the page Magong, Taiwan. Not super important, but it looks out of place. Can we fix this? Lesgles (talk) 17:48, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

It looks fine to me: Bân-lâm-gú. It's possible that your computer doesn't have the "â" and "ú" characters in the x-small-sans-serif font, and so uses a fallback font. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:27, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Oops, I forgot I asked this. I thought it might be that, but it displays fine outside of the language bar. I think it has to do with the fact that my computer sees the Chinese tag, so it renders it in a font used for Chinese characters (Heiti SC), even though the language uses Latin letters. Anyway, I suppose you're right in that this has more to do with my settings and fonts. Lesgles (talk) 16:40, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Featured Articles - clarification needed

The new text contradicts itself here - the instructions say you need...

{{Link FA|language code}}
[[language code:Title]]

...but the example that follows does not include the links to the French and German "tomato" articles. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:42, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

 Fixed The Anonymouse (talk | contribs) 17:46, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure that was the right fix. I've just noticed a bot edit to Contract bridge which removed all the interwiki links, yet the two FA stars are still being displayed correctly. -- John of Reading (talk) 15:49, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, I misunderstood and thought the example was for pre-Wikidata usage. Corrected. The Anonymouse (talk | contribs) 17:25, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Most IL links?

Is there a list somewhere of the pages that have the most interlanguage links? How about most ILL-linked pages on other wikipedias that are missing a corresponding page in English? Sasata (talk) 20:51, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Sorting order

I don't understand the sorting instruction: "...alphabetically based on the local names of the languages". How do you alphabetize local names when they are written in many different alphabets? Or is there a list of standard English transliterations of all the local language names? The reference at m:Interwiki sorting order seems to have changed since this paragraph was written. Set theorist (talk) 09:35, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that it's critical. If you put a new ILL in what you believe to be the right place, but which isn't "correct", sooner or later a bot will come along to update other ILLs, and it'll move yours to the proper place at the same time. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:19, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Well I think I've figured out the answer. The page MediaWiki:Interwiki config-sorting order says "meta-native-languagename", meaning that this wiki uses the list order at meta:MediaWiki:Interwiki config-sorting order-native-languagename (whose underlying logic is explained at its talk page). It would be nice if there were clear link to this list directly from these instructions. Set theorist (talk) 08:01, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

I guess that as the interlanguage stuff is all done by wikidata, most of the "sorting" problems will go away. But the number of languages keeps increasing, making it awkward to find particularly slighly unfamiliar languages. I would like to suggest that in many cases there is a clear "Prime" language for an article, which should be given prominence. Places, people, almost all cultural artefacts "belong" to one (or sometimes two or three) languages; even if you do not speak a word of Georgian, you can guess which page for Tblisi will have the most photographs. Imaginatorium (talk) 07:18, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

Until the introduction of Wikidata, the order that the interlanguage links (ILLs) were displayed was directly governed by the order that they were given within the Wikitext. However, the introduction of Wikidata has changed all that: regardless of whether the ILLs are stored in Wikidata or given in the Wikitext (or a mixture of the two), they are displayed in the order given by meta:MediaWiki:Interwiki config-sorting order-native-languagename - the same file that is mentioned above. It would require a change to the MediaWiki software to allow an article-specific override (i.e. to place თბილისი at the head of the list for Tbilisi), which is outside the scope of this talk page. You might obtain some success by posting to WP:VPT, but it's likely that they'll direct you to Bugzilla. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:26, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

Adding interwiki language link to an article that doesn't have one

I'm probably missing something, but I can't see where in this page it explains how to add an interwiki language link to an article that doesn't have one. OK, I read "At the bottom of the Wikidata language list is an add link", and indeed that is true when there is already a language list. But how are you supposed to add a language when there isn't a language list, and therefore isn't an add link? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 11:05, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

If an article doesn't yet have any interlanguage links listed, and thus does not have the "Edit links" link in the language section, you have to navigate to wikidata directly, and then click on "create an item". In the label field enter the page title then a short description in the field for that. Now you can add the interlanguage link at the bottom under the heading for "List of pages linked to this item". Maybe this page needs to say something about that:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 12:25, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. Yes, I'd got about that far, by going to relevant page in another language and clicking the equivalent of "edit links" from there. But it doesn't seem to work, the list of languages still doesn't appear (to me, at least). Although I've edited the wikidata, Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai still has no language links, and the "English" link from Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai still leads to Giovanni Rucellai, which is now a disambiguation page. Well, maybe I did something wrong; but in the absence of any guidance at all, it's hard to guess what my mistake might have been. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 12:47, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

What is more, I don't have an "Edit links" link on Giovanni Rucellai, though I have several languages visible. Are we quite sure that this is preferable to the old method? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 12:57, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

(e/c [replying to your first follow-up message]) Ah, I think you're caught in a cache loop. Everything is working fine. Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai has a full list of links, and the English link from the Italian Wikipedia leads to it. Go bypass your cache and you should see the same thing I am. Best regards--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:02, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Thank you again for replying. I'd thought of that (and thought that if that were the problem, it should really have been picked up in beta testing and fixed before trying to implement this). I'd emptied the cache & reloaded the page several times before posting the above. Nothing. Now I've tried with different browser, one I haven't used for a year or so, and with a different browser on a different machine. Nothing. The language links don't show up. I don't myself see how that can be a cache problem (can it?) so suspect that there may be some other glitch at work here. Any advice welcome! Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 15:26, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

I did not see any languages listed as well. I use a script that lists the Wikidata link under the title. The article did have that link, so I opened the Wikidata page. On Wikidata I have the slurpInterwiki gadget enabled. I selected 'Automatic addition' and automatically imported labels and descriptions. The article now has the language list. Possibly a Wikidata cache issue? --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:49, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Excellent, thank you very much, Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai now appears correctly to me, and that's what I wanted to achieve. But the Italian article still links to the wrong page, and Giovanni Rucellai still doesn't have an "Edit links" link. I continue to be somewhat concerned that this system was deployed without adequate testing. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 16:12, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Giovanni Rucellai does not have a Wikidata page, so it doesn't have the 'edit links'. Sampling the current ILLs, they are all for Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai, so the current ILLs seem to be wrong. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:24, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm a bit baffled why you (Gadget) would not see it after I actually saw the list of interlanguage links on the English Wikipedia page, at the time I wrote the last message. Hmm. If it was a server cache issue I can't imagine why it would show for me but not for you--somehow browser specific? Anyway, I am always amazed at the ever new ways in which computer/software glitches can manifest. Glad it's cleared up.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 21:34, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

I think all this confusion can be avoided by ignoring Wikidata and inserting the appropriate interwiki links into the respective articles in each language. I think some bots will then deal with implementing these links at Wikidata. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:52, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm also having problems with adding inter-language links where none previously existed. The old method worked immediately, no "cache problems"; what was the problem that to be solved? Reading the above does not help since it seems to be more complicated and less obvious (to me at any rate) than before. I use Firefox 20.0.1. A recent article I've updated is Vsevolod Murakhovsky; although the equivalent Russian article exists, I couldn't set up a link in the script edits and there's no previously existing links so the new method doesn't work. I managed to access the Russian article and copied the link as {{Russian|Мураховский, Всеволод Серафимович}}. Either make the process simpler or revert to the old method, please; or allow both methods. This should be about enabling users, not inserting hurdles or implementing "clever" code. Was any prior consultation or testing attempted; if I'd implemented in this sort of way in my IT job, my appraisal would be compromised. Sorry to sound annoyed, but I am. Folks at 137 (talk) 08:43, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

For any page on English Wikipedia, the Wikidata is held at [[d:Special:ItemByTitle/enwiki/fullpagename]] hence the Wikidata for Vsevolod Murakhovsky is at d:Special:ItemByTitle/enwiki/Vsevolod Murakhovsky. It works for other languages too: see d:Special:ItemByTitle/ruwiki/Мураховский, Всеволод Серафимович. Since the Russian one exists, but the English one doesn't, you would go to the Russian page, locate the "List of pages linked to this item", and at the bottom there should be an "[add]" link. Click that, and under "Language", enter en and under "Linked article", enter the title of the page on English Wikipedia, then click "Save". That's all you need to do at Wikidata. Return to the English article Vsevolod Murakhovsky and either make any edit, or WP:PURGE the page. The language links will appear immediately. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:14, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

How, precisely, is that better than the old method? Folks at 137 (talk) 09:00, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

It isn't, but you can ignore all that and continue doing it the old way; some bots will do the grunt work described above. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 14:06, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, MB, I'll give it a go. "KISS" - "Keep It Simple, Stupid" is a good approach. Folks at 137 (talk) 22:33, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

Exactly how is the "wikidata" page reached from an article with no links? Is there supposed to be a link there or what? If so, I did not see it. 85.217.43.203 (talk) 04:39, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Merging WikiData items

I think SAN and San should be merged. Can anyone explain me how to do it? Thanks. —  Ark25  (talk) 21:20, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

See d:Help:Merge. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:17, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

LSD spanish version

I can't seem to link the Spanish LSD page with the English version. Currently the spanish version lists no translation at all, whereas the English one shows all the languages. If I try to add it from [[3]] it says "The specified article could not be found on the corresponding site. Details: The external client site did not provide page information." Same if I do it the other way. Also, trying to search for the item on wikidata gives nothing [results], but trying to create one says it already exists. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hallucynogenyc (talk • contribs) 22:54, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

LSD is a redirect; Wikidata does not permit interlanguage links to be set up for redirects. You need to link to the redirect's target, i.e. Lysergic acid diethylamide. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:04, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Lead section needs update

An editor suggested on my talkpage that the Lead section of this page, needs an update, to better summarize the contents of this page, and the recommended methods for editing interlanguage links. Particularly a brief explanation of the new Wikidata method. Thanks. –Quiddity (talk) 16:54, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Where to report remaining interlanguage links?

The Liturgy article still contains interwiki link to the Hebrew article. I am not totally sure but it looks like it (the Hebrew article) is already included in the wikidata entry. The Hebrew link still exists in all the other languages' articles. The issue should be solved with a robot, I guess. Is there a place to report such remaining links? —  Ark25  (talk) 10:57, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Problems with "interwikis" in the Spanish-language Wikipedia

I've been trying to ensure that the interlanguage links are complete for a certain topic (RNE Radio 5 in this case, as it happens) for which there are corresponding articles in the Catalan-, English-, French-, and Spanish-language Wikipedias. While I can make the necessary edits to the articles in ca, en, and fr without any problem, the Spanish-language Wp won't let me do so -- and furthermore sends me to a Wikidata page that is far from transparent with respect to its purpose or how it is meant to be used!

I suppose I could take the attitude that, if that's the way you want to play it, Spanish Wikipedia -- making life difficult for your volunteer editors -- then "that's your funeral": your articles will be less comprehensive, interwiki-wise, than the corresponding ones in other languages.

So why am I raising this question here, in the English-language Wp? It's because that Wikidata page is written in English -- and I'm wondering, therefore, if there isn't perhaps something Wikimedia-wide amiss here: some kind of error in the Spanish-language Wp?

I do hate it when the techies take it on themselves to "fix" something that I've never experienced problems with before -- but I hope, even so, that "someone who knows" will be kind enough to overlook my apparent Luddism and let me know 'qué pasa?. -- Picapica (talk) 13:04, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

I think it's fixed now. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:57, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

@Michael Bednarek: Not quite - two edits were still needed, at the Catalan and French Wikipedias.

@Picapica: To change the display language at Wikidata, go to d:Special:Preferences and it's a selection list under "Internationalisation". --Redrose64 (talk) 14:21, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

Can one wikilink to a particular script version of a Wikipedia article?

Is there a way to use interlanguage links to link to a particular script version of a Wikipedia article? For example, the Serbian and Mandarin Chinese Wikipedias use multiple scripts.

Serbian uses both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets and Wikipedia has the Cyrillic version of an article at https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Црна_Гора and the Latin-alphabet version at https://sr.wikipedia.org/sr-el/Црна_Гора. Is there any way to link to the Latin version with a wikilink?

Chinese uses both simplified and traditional characters with regional variations. The main interlanguage link is to an article such as https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/蒙特內哥羅 that mixes both scripts, something rare outside of Wikipedia. The simplified article with Chinese usage is at https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/蒙特內哥羅 and the traditional article with Taiwanese usage is at https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/蒙特內哥羅. Is there any way to link to these latter versions with a wikilink?

This question was asked previously by User:InfoCan here but was not answered.

Thanks. —  AjaxSmack  17:49, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

How to add a new version for non-existing language?

When I tried to use "Edit links" to add a new Chinese version, some error message told me: The specified article could not be found on the corresponding site. The external client site did not provide page information. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Anderscui (talk • contribs) 05:34, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Which article? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:03, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Pinging : @Anderscui: – SJ + 00:04, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm facing pretty much the same problem when I try to add some newly written in Bulgarin language Categories to the main language space WIKIDATA.--BioPupil (talk) 15:01, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

just need put Chinese name in that text box, not whole url. have a try. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nautcpg (talk • contribs) 11:46, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Stray text, can't figure out how to make it go away

Could someone more knowledgeable about the interlanguage linking process take a look at HMCS St. John's (FFH 340)? There is a piece of text at the top of the article that reads HMCS St. John's (FFH 340)]], and I have a suspicion it is related to the link to the French article NCSM St. John's (FFH 340), but for the life of me I can't figure out how to get rid of it. Thanks KConWiki (talk) 04:38, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Very strange, but my edit seems to have fixed it. I tried purging first, without effect. By the way, I would ask questions like this at WP:VPT. Johnuniq (talk) 05:24, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Deleted section about obsolete interlanguage link system

I deleted the "Sorting" section, which was about the preferred sorting order for link tags under the old system of interlanguage links in the wikitext. This section dated back to at least 2007. It's not needed anymore, because there are no links to sort. – Margin1522 (talk) 10:07, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

"Other" section

I was bold and deleted this entire section. It started out with a theoretical discussion that probably used to be of interest to system adminstators. I don't really understand it and doubt that editors need to read it. The rest of it was material that has already been covered above. The one thing I considered keeping was wrapping interlanguage links on template pages in <noinclude>...</noinclude>. But today template pages are handled by the Wikidata system, just like other pages, so everything said above applies here as well. I doubt there are many of those links left. If anyone wants to revive that, or anything else that may still be valuable, please do.

This section was moved in 2010 from Help:Interwiki linking, where it was called "Interlanguage links". So before deleting it I added a {{Copied}} template here and at the talk page of Help:Interwiki linking, to keep the history straight. Ultimately I suspect that much of this material was originally from Meta or Mediawiki, from 6 or more years ago. – Margin1522 (talk) 18:38, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Adding links to other languages?

Hi there, the explanations on this page about adding links to external WP pages about the same subject are not self-evident. I've tried to add the link to the German page http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favignana on its equivalent page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favignana but somehow I get a warning message that the "external client site 'dewiki' did not provide page information for page 'http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favignana'" -- what am I missing here? Thanks, Not Sure (talk) 03:14, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Those two articles decribe slightly different entities, the island and the comune. There's nothing that can be done under the new "improved" system of interwiki links. Originally, quite some time ago, articles could contain interwiki links to more than one article in a target language; not any more. The only thing you can do is add interwiki links manually to those languages you think are missing, similar to the current situation at Commons:Favignana and Commons:Category:Favignana, but they may be removed by overenthusiastic editors or bots. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:22, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

The "Adding a new link" section is absolutely outdated. I'm trying to add a link between "ca:Bunyols de vent" and "fr:Pets de nonne" and it's impossible to do. I give up. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.48.160.236 (talk) 16:49, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

It appears that Jaumellecha has added the links. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:22, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

The New System Is Flawed

I think the new system for interlanguage links is flawed and I would like to know how to overcome its deficiency.

An example is the topic of Compost or Composting. Technically they are distinct (one is a "thing", another is a "procedure"), but in practice they belong to the same topic and are discussed together (as they should). For instance, in the English wiki, there is not a separate article for "Composting", as it is redirected to "Compost", and this works the same way in the great majority of other language wikis.

There are 49 languages that have articles on the topic of Compost/Composting. Only seven languages have separate articles for both titles, while 42 languages have articles that are either exclusively under the title "Compost" (33 languages) or exclusively under the title "Composting" (9 languages).[4][5]

That means that from the EN wiki, I won't be able to access this topic in 9 languages (including DE-FR-PT-NO-PL), and conversely, if I am reading the PT or FR wiki, I won't be able to jump to the corresponding topic in 33 other languages. So, what would be a reasonable solution? --HYC (talk) 22:27, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

@HYC: English WP used to have separate articles, but then Composting was merged into Compost. That might explain why different languages have one or the other, or both. In this case, I think the best solution would be to go to Wikidata and propose that the topics for Compost and Composting be merged. I've never done that, but it's something I been wanting to learn more about. – Margin1522 (talk) 05:10, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

p.s. If you do that, maybe first you would want to look at the talk page for Compost. At the top it has a record of when the merge took place. – Margin1522 (talk) 05:19, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

The problem is of course not confined to "Compost"/"Composting". Every week, I come across articles where the subject is treated to a different level of detail in different Wikipedias. The old-old system allowed interwikilinks links to be inserted at will, many-to-one, one-to-many, whatever was required. Then, in preparation for the central Wikidata repository, only one targetted language was shown, even if several links to language [[xx: were included. Then they were migrated to Wikidata were control over interwikilinks by editors with experience in the subject is much reduced (that's a euphemism). I don't think the old-old state of affairs will ever return, but it's worth every now and then to point out the shortcomings of the current system. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:21, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't think that it's possible to merge items on Wikidata when one language has two pages. For example, at English Wikipedia, we have Doctor Who for the TV programme (linked from d:Q34316 on Wikidata), and Doctor (Doctor Who) for the title character (linked from d:Q34358). Until twelve days ago, German Wikipedia combined these into the single page de:Doctor Who, which is linked from d:Q34316; and the Wikidata page d:Q34358 had no entry for German - to make the link from English, at the bottom of Doctor (Doctor Who) (English) we had [[de:Doctor Who#Der Doktor]] which at the time was AFAIK the only way of getting a second English page to link to that German page. However, German Wikipedia have now created the page de:Der Doktor thus resolving that problem. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:55, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Another example is Tokyo, where these is a long discussion on the talk page because some languages have two articles, while English and Japanese have only one. That sort of petered out because nobody has a good solution, and there wasn't a lot of support for splitting our article just because other languages have two. But in this case I think that merging "Compost"/"Composting" would at least allow linking between the languages that have only one, which would be progress. It would be fairly complicated and might require the help of one of the wizards there who are familiar with the procedures for refactoring topics. – Margin1522 (talk) 19:38, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

• Yes, but all this toing and froing over particular instances misses the problem. The current system appears to assume that all languages are (more-or-less!) isomorphic, which I would call the Translation Fallacy (or at least, TF1, the first of several). Given that TF1 is embedded in all state-of-the-art localisation systems, it's likely that the people implementing the wikidata stuff (if I understand correctly) blithely imagine that the problem does not exist. In fact, the thing to look at for inspiration here is Unicode, which is an engineering solution to a much much smaller, but basically similar problem. Unicode contains all sorts of stuff that could really be called nonsense, yet it works, largely by pandering to everyone's nonsense. Just by way of simple example, no rational European would have two different codes for the Roman 'a' depending on its "width", but that is what Unicode gives us, because of something in 1980s computing. Almost certainly this has to allow the wikidata classification to be finer than anyone needs, and the practical mapping has to sit on top of this. Anyway, at some point this will have to be addressed. Imaginatorium (talk) 19:57, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
  • Yes, definitely, this has be solved. I recently found out that Unicode has two different blocks for small caps. One of them is for the interlinear glosses used by linguists. Apparently these are designed for the x-height of lowercase characters, so they are a bit shorter than normal ones. So the linguists get their own small caps. Ideally Wikidata should work the same way. – Margin1522 (talk) 21:17, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
  • There is no limit to the "fineness" of Wikidata - you can create as many Wikidata items as you want. Rather, the problem is the discrepancy between the levels of fineness wanted by each language-wiki: Spanish-wiki wants an independent article on "composting", English-wiki does not. English-wiki wants an independent article on "Doctor (Doctor Who)", German-wiki does not. English-wiki wants an independent article on "Tokyo Metropolis", Japanese-wiki does not. And so on. Intuitively, I would solve this by allowing a redirect article and its target article to be connected to different Wikidata items. So en:Compost would connect to d:Q212254 while en:Composting (a redirect) would connect to d:Q13222335, etc. Why this is not already allowed, I do not know. There could be a really good explanation or it could be an oversight due to the fallacy you describe.--Anders Feder (talk) 22:22, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

I think one of the fundamental flaws of the system is that it does not allow to use redirects in the same way as articles. Whenever you try to enter a redirect into Wikidata, the system replaces this by a link to the target of the redirect. While this might be useful in some (few) cases, in the majority of cases, it does not make sense at all. At the minimum, there should be an option to override the behaviour, as otherwise it renders Wikidata useless except for the most trivial case.

One way to work around this problem is to continue to use the old syntax for local links.

However, there's another trick how to force redirects into the Wikidata system (and it clearly shows that it would be easy to allow this in the Wikidata software):

1. Disable the #redirect statement on the redirect page in question by removing the # and saving the edit with an edit summary indicating that this is a temporary edit to work around a bug in Wikidata.
2. Now add the (former) redirect page to the corresponding Wikidata node just as if it would be a normal article. Wikidata will no longer detect the redirect and therefore accept the edit and not display an error message.
3. Go back to the redirect page and reenable the redirect by readding the # again.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 01:11, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Doesn't Wikidata have bots that go around looking for Q pages where one or more of the Wikipedia language entries is a redirect? --Redrose64 (talk) 07:52, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

I don't know. In those cases, where I used that trick to force redirects into Wikidata, I haven't seen bots changing this later on. However, in all these cases, the redirect target pages already had Wikidata nodes with entries for the same languages as well, so, for a bot to bypass the redirect, it would have to remove another entry from the target's node first. Since a bot has no means to decide which entry would be the better one, this is where they might give up. I haven't tested what will happen, when the redirect's target is not associated to a Wikidata node already, or if such a link is removed later on. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 15:32, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

From the description above, it looks like Wikidata doesn't want redirects in its database. Since we are supposed to be explaining the official design, I don't think we should be talking to users about "flaws" in the design or showing them how to defeat it. I'm also not so clear about the benefits of creating redirects to solve the many->one linking problem. The argument seems to be that creating a redirect to the target article and then (manually?) linking to the redirect is better than manually linking to the target article directly. But what's the difference? In either case the user is going to end up in the same place, so why do we need to link via a redirect? – Margin1522 (talk) 16:22, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

We have some 400+ pages with names like List of minor planets: 123001–124000, each of which might have up to 1000 incoming redirs, one for each minor planet listed that isn't notable enough to sustain its own article. In several cases (e.g. 123860 Davederrick), these redirects have interlanguage links because another language Wikipedia (e.g. Italian) does consider that particular lump of rock to be notable. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:57, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Margin: The intended design is that a Wikidata item accepts only one article per item, because each item should represent a singular concept. The backend will not allow you to link to an article directly in more than one item. --Izno (talk) 19:43, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Redrose: It probably should, even if it doesn't. --Izno (talk) 19:43, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Matthiaspaul: A quick comment re the really hackish workaround: It is not intended design to be able to perform those actions. Frankly, just don't do it, since there's some stuff on the backside that I believe it breaks (mostly the page-link checking noted above in re to Margin).

There was a Wikidata RFC which concluded with an expressed desire for the technical side to allow redirects to be used in Wikidata items (due to this exact problem; we call it the d:WD:Bonnie and Clyde problem), but the developers have not expressed any intent to work on that technical side (partially because there are a large number of priorities on their plate already, partially because there is a current intended workaround using local IW links, and partially because they may (or may not?) have some desire of their own not to perform that particular change).— Preceding unsigned comment added by Izno (talk • contribs) 19:45, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

I think I see how this happened. Looking at Redrose's example (123860 Davederrick), it seems that that article was created by a bot, then propagated to other languages (like Yoruba and Chinese) by bots. Then a bot created the Wikidata item (Q1117212). So far like a regular article. But finally a human changed it to a redirect to the list article, which left the Wikidata item pointing to a redirect. From that, unless Wikidata has a bot to check whether former articles have over time been converted into redirects, there are probably many more Wikidata items pointing to redirects.

But this is still not something that a user did intentionally, and there is no manual interlanguage link in the wikitext of the redirect page 123860 Davederrick. Interlanguage is handled in the normal way by Wikidata. So I am still wondering if we need to explain how to write a manual interlanguage link in the wikitext of a redirect page. – Margin1522 (talk) 20:42, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

The page d:WD:Bonnie and Clyde#Interwikis actually explains how to execute the trick that Matthiaspaul suggested. In my view, that is at least tacit approval to use it. StevenJ81 (talk) 22:34, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

I would not say that if you are nonetheless willing to associate a WD item to a WP redirect is tacit "approval". "Recognition" might be the correct word. --Izno (talk) 01:07, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

It has only been there for about a week, and I was only the second person to edit it, so the wording may not be quite there yet. But yes, it does look like recognition. The creator has 200,000 edits on Wikidata, so he probably knows what he's doing. Again though, this is a Wikidata technique, not a manual interlanguage link, which is what we are explaining in the article. If we are going to explain this, it would need a separate section. – Margin1522 (talk) 01:24, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

In these cases, do we want to encourage manual interlanguage links? There are a lot of good reasons to prefer using the Wikidata-link-to-a-redirect approach, and almost none to prefer using manual interwiki links in situ. StevenJ81 (talk) 02:08, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

To tell the truth, I'm not real enthusiastic about encouraging either. As noted, the Wikidata-link-to-a-redirect technique is a hack. I'd want more of a consensus over there before we start encouraging people to use it. Does Wikidata have RFCs or a forum like the Village Pump where they decide questions like this? – Margin1522 (talk) 04:35, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

(←) d:WD:RFC, d:WD:Project chat. --Izno (talk) 04:48, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Since articles may become redirects at any time without Wikidata keeping track of this, links to redirects already exist in Wikidata, probably even in large numbers. There is nothing "hackish" with them, only the suggested way to force them in directly is a bit cumbersome - but that's a cosmetic issue not affecting the integrity of the Wikidata system in the slightest, and also an issue that could be easily solved at any later stage without having to change the database model at all.

Adding redirects to Wikidata does not compromise the idea of having one node for one concept, it rather helps to maintain this model even in the present much-too-limited-implementation. It also does not conflict with possible future extensions of the Wikidata model to possibly support more than one link from/to one WP to one node.

Since adding suitable redirects to Wikidata helps users (including editors) searching for information in other WPs and adds useful associations to the database, it is in more than one way better than only adding local interlanguage links. The only drawback is the necessary dummy edit to the local redirect. It would be possible to avoid this by a very simple modification to the Wikidata system, where the frontend would allow a user to check a checkbox named "redirect" (similar to "good article" etc.) and, if checked, the system would accept the redirect instead of displaying the error message. Once a link has been accepted, it is not necessary to make a difference between a node linking to an article or a redirect, so is wouldn't even be necessary to maintain a "redirect" attribute in the database. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:50, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

To further support my point, here is a former article-turned-redirect with previous Wikidata interwiki links still being maintained: Andreas Lubitz, and here's a redirect deliberately forced into the Wikidata system using the trick above: Flettner rotor. The outcome is exactly the same, so the above described method cannot cause any harm and thus is okay to use until someone comes up with a better solution to solve the problem. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 15:47, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Interlanguage link in-prose formatting

There is a proposal to add superscript and subscript display options to {{Interlanguage link multi}}, which is the backbone of all interlanguage linking templates, here. Alakzi (talk) 15:48, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Good python script to add interlanguage links automatically

Hello I have a list of several thousands articles written in French that I would like to link to their equivalent pages in other languages. The titles are basically the same in all languages, so the big part of the task can be automated. I was not able to locate a good script that could help me doing the job (interwiki.py does not seem to write entries in wikidata though it is able to list all the matching pages). Thanks for your help --Gallicbot (talk) 18:18, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

The issue is fixed. Thanks to "Jura" who helped on this topic --Gallicbot (talk) 08:02, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

The section Method is against guidance

From the history of the article:

• 19:23, 14 September 2015‎ PBS (‎Method: deprecated)
• 20:44, 14 September 2015‎ Izno (trim down to just a see also)

I introduced the wording:

This method is deprecated see MOSSIS in WP:SISTER. Two exceptions are Wiktionary and Wikisource links

Izno changed this to

See also: WP:MOSSIS

Using inter-language-links within the body of an article has never been appreciated. Some years ago there was a hot discussion on WT:LAYOUT about linking to sister projects and the compromise reached was it was OK for Wikisource and Wiktionary. The advise in WP:LAYOUT (which I did not include for brevity) is:

Links to Wikimedia sister projects and {{Spoken Wikipedia}} should generally appear in "External links", not under "See also". Two exceptions are Wiktionary and Wikisource links that may even be linked inline (e.g., to the text of a document being discussed or to a word that might not be familiar to all readers).

This is a help page not a guideline. Personally I would removed the whole section Method. But if it is to remain then it should be made very clear at the start of the section that although technically possible this method should not be used (per guidance).

Now that the advise in the previous section with the use of templates exists there is really no reason for this method to be used and there are lots of good reasons that it should not be. -- PBS (talk)

A help page exists to provide documentation on how to implement some decision. Wikipedia-space exists to provide documentation on why we would come to that decision; thus, how we (do not) use that documentation is left to Wikipedia-space. "Deprecated" is not correct in the context of documentation since I can still use that 'method'. As for the sentence on exceptions, we should not introduce duplicate guidance. That leaves a link to WP:MOSSIS, as WP:SISTER is fundamentally a duplicate link. Changing the T:See also to a T:Further information wouldn't cause me heartburn, I suppose, but the link to MOSSIS is fundamentally the only useful piece of information to this page. --Izno (talk) 12:54, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

A help page ought to give useful help. Advising on doing something that is against policy or guidance is not helpful. -- PBS (talk) 19:47, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I disagree, per the purpose of these pages. If you would like to respond to my points in detail, feel free. --Izno (talk) 00:31, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

"purpose of these pages" what is the policy/guidance on the purpose of these help pages? PBS (talk) 19:32, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

As a markup language, wikitext supports this capability. That being the case, it should be documented. There is also the question of how heavily it is used. I would think that if there is a proposal to eliminate the explanation of a language feature, the proposer should at least bring some data as to how often it's used. – Margin1522 (talk) 23:42, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

how often or not that it is used it is used it is against the guidance, and this needs to be made clear even if it is not currently used. This is basically an external links issue. Wikipedia guidance on this is not to include external links into pages and even though it is possible to do so it is deprecated (see Help:External links). -- PBS (talk) 12:43, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Please do not edit war for your preferred version against the established consensus.

Its use is not deprecated in the technical sense--do you not understand this point or do you choose not to understand this point? A page which is meant to help people understand its usage, where applicable, should describe how it is used. Period. End of story. Wikipedia's guidance on the use of particular interlanguage links is irrelevant to that concern. That point aside, seeing as some pages also require its use (see d:WD:Bonnie and Clyde), calling it "deprecated" is strictly incorrect. --Izno (talk) 16:51, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

The established consensus lies in the guidelines. and per Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines: "Policies and guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense."

It is also possible to add a direct URL link to the foreign wikipage, but that does not mean it is desirable to place that into this help page without warning that it ought not to be done. BTW Izno, please consider that you are exchanging view with another person who has been editing Wikiepdia for considerably longer than you have, and even if I had not, I don not think there is an excuse for your hectoring tone. -- PBS (talk) 15:50, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

considerably longer and hectoring tone are both ad hominem, so I will assume that these are only actually meant in the sense of the BTW to which they are attached and not as some sort of argument that you are more right because you have been here longer or that my tone (regardless of its character) somehow discredits my point.

The established consensus [...] common sense." This is irrelevant.

It is also possible to add a direct URL link to the foreign wikipage, but that does not mean it is desirable to place that into this help page without warning that it ought not to be done. This page is a) a help page which b) should describe how to do something and c) not whether or when to do something. A neutral pointer to another location on the "whether and when" is sufficient to inform people referencing this page that something is or is not deprecated, not least because injecting the specific verbiage you selected is misleading but also because it duplicates the statements that are in the referenced page which can easily lead to inconsistencies. I stand by my edit and another editor agrees with it. If you cannot answer my points to any salient degree then you may wish to seek a 4th opinion or start an WP:RFC. I met you halfway on referencing the guideline to begin with, as it is. --Izno (talk) 16:26, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Interlanguage links for same content/articles with multiple items on Wikidata

Often, two "items" (in term of Wikidata) will be described on the same Wikipedia pages. This is especially common in biology articles: for a family with only one genus, chances are they will be described together (there is really no reason to separate them though).

An example is Moschus (wikidata:Q3866060) and Moschidae (wikidata:Q229084). They are two items on Wikidata, but are described on same page here (Musk deer) on English Wikipedia, as well as most of other languages of Wikipedias (we do have a few languages that distinguish them). Don't get me wrong, It makes perfect sense to separate them on Wikidata and I am totally agree with that. But the problem is, where should we put the sitelinks to? The first item or the second one? Currently, the links are fairly equally separated on two different items, which makes it very hard for readers to find other language versions of the same content.

I asked this very question on Wikidata project (wikidata:Wikidata:Project_chat#Any_guideline_about_taxon_names?) but people there seem more concerned about the data items themselves, instead of the sitelinks (which is more important to Wikipedia projects). One suggests to just follow what term the title uses, which is OKish solution from the point view of Wikidata I guess but doesn't sound appropriate for Wikipedia's purpose (to link different languages together. and it still runs into the same trouble: where should articles like "Musk Dear" go, Moschus or Moschidae?)--fireattack (talk) 07:05, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

The reason they're "concerned about the data items themselves" is because we've (Wikidatans) largely accepted that this is going to happen regardless of anything we can do, and that this has been the case literally since we started working on Wikidata. We usually call this problem the Bonnie and Clyde problem. We do our best to link the different concepts with the correct relations. Taxonomy happens to be one of the worst offenders. --Izno (talk) 14:07, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I understand this would be a Paradox's box to open so what about this case in particular? What can we do now to help average readers of Wikipedia to find, say fr:Moschidae from en:Musk deer more easily (it happens a lot. For example, If I were a French but found the term Musk deer on a English forum, I may want to check in on Wikipedia)? --fireattack (talk) 18:37, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Right now, if you want to present the links directly, you can set them using the old style of interwiki link. There should probably be a template that grabs the interwikis from a listed page and provides the ones which do not override the links on the current page, which would enable you to leverage Wikidata without changing anything locally.

You can also consider leaving it alone and instead just making sure the en articles say "these taxa are e.g. synonyms"; an editor who is interested in another language will probably be able to find what he is looking for by leaving Wikipedia and Googling for those. Where there are two pages here and fewer at another wiki, you can make sure the two pages link to each other clearly. --Izno (talk) 19:33, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

How to add?

"At the bottom of the Wikidata language list is a link labelled 'Edit links'. Clicking on this will reveal two text boxes, one for the language and another for the article title" why does that not work? i only get a page that has lots of "edit" links on it and i do not see the 2 text boxes at all, so how can i add the links? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.187.135.164 (talk) 23:19, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

 Done. I have updated the instructions at Help:Interlanguage links#Adding a new link to describe the new user interface. Best wishes. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 10:01, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Make them all visible again

What a horrible idea it was to make only some languages visible. It used to be one click to any language. Now, you have to click "More languages", at which point a box opens up that is ridiculously big with huge spaces between each language. Can't we go back to a list showing all the languages? What was wrong with it? Timtranslates (talk) 11:01, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Isn't the behaviour you describe the result of selecting the "Compact language links" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures and explained at mw:Universal Language Selector/Compact Language Links? Untick it if you don't like it. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:52, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Interlanguage links to media files

Currently this guide does not explain how to create a interlanguage link to a media file. E.g. English wikipedia has en:File:Anthem of the Republic of Macedonia (Instrumental).ogg which we simply link here as

File:Anthem of the Republic of Macedonia (Instrumental).ogg

How to create a link to that file from Wikipedia in another language? --Rprpr (talk) 13:08, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Creating a link is simple: pt:Ficheiro:Kate Bush Wuthering Heights Sample.ogg (leading colon). But displaying the file, audio or image, can't be done: pt:Ficheiro:Kate Bush Wuthering Heights Sample.ogg (no leading colon) doesn't work. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:38, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

How to handle REDIRECT URLs?

Hi, I am trying to link https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q951722#sitelinks-wikipedia ("convection oven") to https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varmluftsugn. However, this svwiki link is a REDIRECT to a section on an article already used on Q36539 ("oven"), so it doesn't work.

Is there no good way to handle this, other than splitting the article on svwiki, so that subset is different? I see this: > the scope of the two items is not in fact the same (typically, the article in one language is wider in scope than the article in the other language) and they should not be linked But I disagree. If someone is looking at the article on enwiki for "convection oven", they should be able to see that it relates to the section on https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugn#Varmluftsugn.

Is it not better to help people by linking to this section of an article, rather than splitting it into a stub on svwiki? Thanks for your time. 212.3.4.130 (talk) 12:42, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

212: This is the d:Help:Bonnie and Clyde problem. One of your solutions is to split it, one of them is to use an old-style interwiki link, and one is to use a blatant hack on Wikidata, or lastly, to do nothing. --Izno (talk) 02:20, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

How do I make interlanguage links?

This used to be really simple. I wanted to link the En:Wiki Provinces of Indonesia to the ID:Wiki id:Daftar provinsi di Indonesia (which means list of provinces of Indonesia). Now, when I laboriously plod through the steps via something called "Wikidata", I receive a message telling me it has failed, and "The link idwiki:Daftar provinsi di Indonesia is already used by item Q28797510. You may remove it from Q28797510 if it does not belong there or merge the items if they are about the exact same topic.". Clicking on Q28797510 points to another Wikimedia page called list of provinces of Indonesia, but there is no article with this name in English Wikiedia. What gives? why make it so complicated? Is there a recommended workaround such as manually adding a link to the Indonesian Wikipedia page in an external links section? Davidelit (Talk) 10:10, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

It appears an IP created list of provinces of Indonesia (Q28797510) but did not do it correctly. One problem is that en:list of provinces of Indonesia does not exist. I guess Q28797510 should be merged with province of Indonesia (Q5098) (and renamed to "Provinces of Indonesia"). I know very little about that, but asking at d:Wikidata:Project chat would probably get assistance.

To just get what you wanted done, go to d:Q28797510 and edit the Wikipedia section and remove the id entry. Then add that id entry at d:Q5098. Johnuniq (talk) 11:14, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

"Name articles"

I would like to ask a question. Does anybody know where and when a decision was made to break interlanguage links for family name disambiguation pages in English Wikipedia with all other Wikipedias? More specifically, why this Wikidata entry links between the pages listing people named Yamagishi in all languages except English, for which a separate entry is reserved? What is the big difference between these entries besides an arbitraty (at least I don't see any particular reason for it) categorization as a "surname article" here? --Deinocheirus (talk) 18:46, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata items are about concepts. A (sur)name is a separate concept from an ambiguous compilation of named things, so it gets its own item. For something like a Japanese name, where there isn't much to say about the name itself (at least in English), you're probably going to see similarities between a disambiguation page and a name page; once you start looking at, say, Smith (surname), the articles are clearly articles. The divisions Wikidata makes tend toward consistency rather than inconsistency (even for the long tail), so that's probably why these are separated as they are. You might reasonably ask at d:Wikidata:WikiProject Names if you want a more thorough answer. -Izno (talk) 19:07, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

... except that this esoteric distinction doesn't apply to the 4 disambiguation pages about the name Yamagishi. The same applies to the name Brunetti where Wikidata pointlessly distinguishes between d:Q992605 for 7 languages and d:Q18510575 for English only. A reader of an English disambiguation page should not be denied access to the same page in other languages. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:19, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

You are attempting to argue with someone without the amount of domain knowledge necessary to even really start discussing. If you want an answer, I already pointed you to the correct place. --Izno (talk) 11:53, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

Interlanguage image links

I have uploaded a fair-use logo to en:Wikipedia to replace a non-free logo that I found on Commons, and I've earmarked the one on Commons for speedy deletion. I've also swapped out the image at Skellefteå Airport. Looking at the Global file usage of the image on Commons I see that it's used at de:Flughafen Skellefteå, gl:Aeroporto de Skellefteå, id:Bandar Udara Skellefteå, sv:Skellefteå Airport and wikidata:Q1432884. I attempted to swap out the image in each of those articles but I can't fathom the syntax. What I'd like to know is, what's the proper procedure for this sort of thing? nagualdesign 12:14, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

I understand that Commons doesn't allow fair-use images. Regardless, images hosted on EN Wikipedia cannot be shared to other Wikipedias, only images on Commons can. Placing a speedydelete on File:Skelleftea Airport.jpg at Commons was probably unwise, particularly as that file passed a licence review. A better course of action would be to upload your File:Skelleftea Airport.png to Commons, especially as that is recommended at the JPG file there. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:00, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

In addition to what Michael Bednarek posted, not every language Wikipedia allows non-free content to be used as can be seen c:COM:FAIR#"Fair use" allowed on some Wikimedia projects, so you will need to figure if where you want to use the image allows local files. If it does, you will have to upload a local file for that Wikipedia only according to that Wikipedia's policy. Moreover, you probably shouldn't have tagged that file for speedy deletion because it's licensing appears to be OK for Commons. I posted something at c:User talk:Josve05a since he reviewed the file's license and he would be the best person to clarify it. -- Marchjuly (talk) 13:52, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Fair enough. Thanks for the replies. Just to clarify, what do you mean when you say, "that file passed a licence review"? nagualdesign 14:03, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

If you go to the file's page and scroll down, you should see a c:Template:License review saying the file was reviewed by Josve05a on 2014-12-31. There are certain editors on Commons who review file licenses. Most reviewers are very experienced Commons' editors who have good grasp of Commons image licensing policies. This does not mean mistakes are never made, just not very often. -- Marchjuly (talk) 14:09, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Ah okay, thank you. I was just looking at the Mynewsdesk article, and it looks like the website, logo and license are indeed kosher. My mistake. Logos are generally copyrighted and I thought it had been uploaded in error. I'll remove the Speedy Delete template... nagualdesign 14:20, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Linking to inexact matches in the sidebar

Several Wikipedias have an article titled "Regaliceratops", but no article titled "Regaliceratops peterhewsi": https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20035817

And several Wikipedias have an article titled "Regaliceratops peterhewsi" but no article titled "Regaliceratops": https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20080328

And one (Portuguese) has both articles.

These are two distinct concepts, so it's correct that they have separate Wikidata entries. Regaliceratops is a genus, and Regaliceratops peterhewsi is a species within that genus.

But it seems that if you're on the English Wikipedia article Regaliceratops, it would make sense to show a link in the sidebar to the Russian article ru:Regaliceratops peterhewsi, wouldn't it?

Should we be doing that? And if so, what's the correct way to do it? Though Wikidata or via the old fashioned method? --ChiveFungi (talk) 18:39, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Please try to resolve that at Wikidata because manually adding interwiki links leads to chaos. I'm not sure where, but perhaps d:Wikidata:Interwiki conflicts. Johnuniq (talk) 23:47, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Review d:WD:BC. --Izno (talk) 23:59, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

The article Regaliceratops is a good example for extended use of the template {{ill}}: "In 2015 ... described the type species Regaliceratops peterhewsi." – which is done via {{ill|Regaliceratops peterhewsi|it||pt||ru}}. Note that this use links to the REDIRECT at Regaliceratops peterhewsi but also to 3 other Wikipedias. When that REDIRECT gets written as a proper article on the species, those interwikilinks will automatically disappear. One can instead link to the Wikidata entry: Regaliceratops peterhewsi ({{ill|Regaliceratops peterhewsi|WD=Q20080328}}). -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:15, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Full language list in sidebar

Hello, I am not sure this is the right place to ask this question, but it’s about the interlanguage links anyhow. The language list at the end of the Wikipedia sidebar used to be a simple alphabetical list of links to wikis in all languages that had a corresponding article. Now this has been changed so that only 9 language links are displayed, and for the rest one has to click the button "n more" and then look for the language one needs. I understand this change is ok for some people since it tidies up the page a bit, but for me it is a continuous nuisance. I am a linguist and I like to check correspondences between way more than 9 languages. A link to a language that is not displayed among the first 9 is hard to find, because the languages are ordered in a counter-intuitive way – some languages appear (in my opinion unnecessarily) in several places and the list jumps unpredictably every now and then from the left column to the right one. Is there any way one can change the settings so that the full language menu will always appear on the sidebar, just as it used to be? Thank you! Dumiac (talk) 11:46, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

@Dumiac: Uncheck the checkbox at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering-languages. --Izno (talk) 14:08, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Awesome, thank you very much! :) Dumiac (talk) 17:02, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

You mean to say that IPs like myself will never again see the alphabetical language link sidebar without logging in? I find this quite a trainsmash. If it has already been voted on and finalized is there at least a hate group I can join to spit nails about this, or an area to protest against it? 41.114.236.224 (talk) 13:16, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Never is a long time. If you are sincerely interested in changing how it works (by adding a preference accessible to an unregistered user, or some such--the default is indeed unlikely to change), you can file a task in Phabricator. That said, you will need some reasoning about why you think you need the full list beyond mere preference. --Izno (talk) 18:51, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't need the full list, but I do want one particular language (Danish) that is almost never shown in the list. I don't log in to sites except when needed, for my own privacy, so the preference doesn't help. If space is somehow short, can't a collapsed list (Europe, Asia etc) be shown in the sidebar?

Also, if I click "More", some languages are suggested to me. This is extremely pointless -- I'm unlikely to understand the promoted language. ƕ (talk) 12:25, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Thoughts on what the interlanguage links template should or could do

Template:Interlanguage link lets us create inline links to one or several other languages where an English version of an article does not exist. Often, the article exists in many more languages than the interlanguage link (or links) points to. The editor who creates the interlanguage link may be biased in their choice by the languages that they themselves are capable of (a bias that would be true for those interlanguage links that I have created), but that may not reflect the need or desire of a reader, or point to the most complete article. I thus wonder whether it would not be more useful to point to the Wikidata item instead? From there, people can see all the languages that are available. That may be a significant advantage and avoids such a bias. It has the disadvantage that the article is always two clicks away rather than just one, and a reader has to know that the Wikidata entry holds links to the various languages in the first instance.

If others agree that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, we may even consider deprecating the use of the interlanguage link template altogether, replacing it with a link to the relevant Wikidata item. Thoughts? Schwede66 19:29, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Creating an article that already exists in another language

Hi I have seen a tag on some pages that goes something like "more information can be incorporated on this topic from Wikipedia in other languages". Basically I want to create a page on the English wiki that already exists on the French, and want to note that such info exists; before I can hopefully bring the English page up to par. Does anyone know the tag? Thanks! AmplifyWiki (talk) 18:59, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Template:Expand language Schwede66 19:54, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! AmplifyWiki (talk) 01:56, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

Errors in ill help pages?

In editing the English WP article on Greta Thurnberg, I attempted to fix a broken link to the Swedish WP. It was this: Paulina Neuding. After reading the help on interlanguage links, I changed it to this: Paulina Neuding, but that doesn't show on the page once published; nor does sv:Paulina Neuding.

It turns out that one correct way to do this is: sv:Paulina Neuding, but this help page does not show the pre-fix colon. I do not consider myself expert enough on the topic to repair the error. Also, the help page on using the ill template appears to show that this is correct, but it does not, in fact, work: Paulina Neuding. Paulmlieberman (talk) 13:52, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

It's not clear to me what advice on interlanguage links made you change your original construct. {{ill}}, which works just fine in your example, is always preferable to [[:xx|article]]. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 14:03, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

The method to which you refer is Help:Interlanguage links#Method. However, I have reverted your change to the article. The behavior of {{ill}} is as-expected. We want to provide a red link in the event to invite someone to create an article on the person on English Wikipedia. --Izno (talk) 14:05, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Should we consider splitting this article?

I recall when I started out here that I found this help page very confusing because it covered two unrelated topics: the sidebar language list and inline links. I find it confusing still that both topics are called "interlanguage links". Then we also have Help:Interwiki linking which covers a similar topic (an editor was confused by that page on the help desk as he was looking for this page). – Thjarkur (talk) 23:24, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 21 May 2020

In the "Adding a new link" section it says: click on 'save' at the top of the box

But in reality when you try adding a new link there is no 'save' button to click. However there is a 'publish' button.

My request is to change the 'save' into 'publish' Thank you. Huldar98 (talk) 11:27, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

@Huldar98: Thank you for spotting that. I've made the change. -- John of Reading (talk) 12:01, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

@John of Reading: You're welcome, thanks for changing it. First time I ask for a change on wikipedia. Amazed by how fast that happened. -- Huldar98 (talk) 14:37, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Why don't Commons use interwiki?

I'm so used to see interwiki links on the left side and to use them that I'm pretty frustrated with the fact that it's not used in Commons, at least on the pages of these categories:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Policies_maintained_by_the_Wikimedia_Foundation/Translations, Or probably even all the pages of the top category: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Policies/Translations

They all use a top-level banner instead. As if it is so frequently used by the visitors - to switch between all these language versions.

It's very tempting to start inserting interwikis but I suspect it hasn't been done before for a reason. Do they deliberately ignore the standard approach? Why?? OK, different language versions are all on the same domain, so what? I don't see how it prevents interwiki from working.

Should the information about this exception and its reasons be added to this article? Nikolay Komarov (talk) 11:42, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Inari Sami language code

The linking tool does not recognize the Inari Sami language code (smn). Inari Sami articles cannot be linked with articles in other Wikipedias. –Uárree (talk) 17:03, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Kähviviste works. Which construct did you use that doesn't work? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:55, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

I used the tool on the page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q267698#sitelinks-wikipedia to create a language link to the Inari Sami wikipedia. It seems that the problem has been fixed meanwhile. Now it works. —Uárree (talk) 03:14, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

FYI discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Linking

Hi all, just FYI there is a discussion on the link style page at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Linking#Linking to other language Wikipedias in articles closely related. Cheers, Facts707 (talk) 18:56, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

How to deal with disambiguation?

In Yenish people, it had a direct link to the Luxembourgish Wikipedia,

[[:lb:Oliver Kayser|Oliver Kayser]]

I wanted to change it to use an interlanguage link template, but upon doing so, found that it didn't appear because English Wikipedia already has an article for Oliver Kayser. However, this is a different Oliver Kayser (an Austrian fencer instead of a Luxembourger musician)! I resolved this by coming up with a disambiguation, "(musician)" and changing the template to

{{Ill|Oliver Kayser (musician)|lt=Oliver Kayser|lb|Oliver Kayser|WD=}}

which solved the issue. Was this the right move though? And if so, should we document this?

Gbear605 (talk) 01:58, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, not quite sure of the style guidelines, but it looks good to me. I noticed the lt parameter isn't documented in the list of parameters and lb isn't mentioned anywhere in the help. Cheers, Facts707 (talk) 18:50, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

|lt= is documented where it's used, at {{ill}}. lb is the ISO 639-1 code for Luxembourgish. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:53, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Inline interlanguage wiki links help page

Not to bother you Mam', but I tried the 3 listed formats for interlinking to a page in another language, and ONLY the 3rd format works; both 1 and 2 give for example the non-clickable absurd plaintext ":fr:xxx" (xxx being the page to link to in the fr namespace). Even so, number 3 "works"... but does NOT give what is documented in this very page, rather: "xxx [fr]". I see Wikipedia (in all languages I used to be involved) has still a LOT of problems with documenting itself. --66.158.141.36 (talk) 02:26, 9 February 2021 (UTC) Alainr345

I'm not familiar with the "listed formats" to which you refer, but here's my cheatsheet for interlanguage links, in case it can be of use: User:Eric#Language_stuff. Eric ^talk 02:42, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Did you read what I wrote; the stuff on your page is a copy-paste of this Help page and... that does NOT work man (if it ever did)! Thanks for the effort anyway. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.158.141.36 (talk) 02:47, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

The first 2 options at Help:Interlanguage links#Inline links (links in the text of the article) are discouraged (and should be removed from that section). Inline links to other language versions should only be done with template {{ill}}. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:02, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

To anonymous editor at 66.158.141.36: Sorry, I did not thoroughly investigate what you wrote; I just glanced at it quickly and thought my cheatsheet might help. What I had on my page was based on a copy/paste from the help page, but was not exactly the same. I have now deleted the outdated material from my page.

@Michael Bednarek: Do you think we should delete methods 1 and 2 from the help page, or maybe gray them out or move them down as a sort of archival note? Eric ^talk 21:57, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

See my previous comments at Help talk:Interlanguage links/Archive 2#The section Method is against guidance. --Izno (talk) 22:25, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

(Creator of this section talking again:) Wow, I see interlinks are a hot topic!... First I want to mention that in the end I COULD test method 1 and 2 successfully BUT only with a pipe syntax (then, as I read here, I nevertheless kept method 3 in the target page). Then... that seems to be a mainly mute point, since method 1 and 2 are "discouraged". WHY on Earth doesn't somebody hike method number THREE to number ONE; wouldn't that be the (almost too) obvious way to get the Help page easy to use for the lame ducks like me guys? (just saying!) --66.158.157.129 (talk) 03:04, 15 February 2021 (UTC) Alainr345

Bonjour Alain- I've been wondering that myself (see above). Just wanted to run it by others first. Eric ^talk 14:15, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

OK, I agree with the consensus so I went ahead and removed options 1 and 2 as discussed. I also merged the following subsection "Method" since it contained only additional options. Facts707 (talk) 18:27, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

@Facts707: Since I occasionally use {{ill}}, I've used this page for reference in the past. I noticed that as part of your revising of the page that you removed the sentence "This option is not preferred because it hides the fact that the English Wikipedia is missing that article, and because it can be very unexpected for someone who doesn't speak German to suddenly be sent to a German page." from this particular section. Based upon what Michael Bednarek posted above about using the ill template, I'm not so sure that particular sentence was something that should've been removed. The current version seems to treat options 1, 2 and 3 equally; however, based upon the above, it seems that option 1 is preferred and the others are in current practice pretty much deprecated. -- Marchjuly (talk) 15:26, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Interwiki data

Hi, I am seeing a lot of redundant data comparing one language wiki to another, the data is simply copy+pasted. For example {{2020–21 UEFA Champions League group tables}} will look absolutely identical in en wiki and es, fr or lt wiki, but the only way to render it in different wikis is to copy+paste code. Is there any other way to link that data from one wiki to another, similar like article link lt:UEFA does? Or any other way for Module:Sports table to pick data from one central location? This way a single edit would update multiple language wikis. Wolfmartyn (talk) 19:39, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

@Wolfmartyn: in theory, you could do this with Wikidata, and perhaps a template to facilitate accessing the right properties and displaying them. You could try linking this discussion from d:Wikidata:Community portal and you may get some folks from Wikidata giving you a better response about this than I can. Also, this template talk page probably isn't the best place to have this discussion; maybe try moving it to (or linking it from) the WP:Tea house, or WP:Village pump. Mathglot (talk) 08:57, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Multilingual links without directing to mobile?

The section "Multilingual links and QR codes" discusses using https://qrpedia.org/ to created multilingual links. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat, if changed to https://en.qrwp.org/Cat, will be redirected in a french browser to https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat. But this goes to the language's mobile website. Is there any way to get a multilingual link that will go to the desktop site? -Thunderforge (talk) 17:27, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

How to add a new link in the sidebar, when there is no "Edit links" link?

How to add a new link in the sidebar, when there is no "Edit links" link?

For example, in this "Talk" page in the sidebar under "Language" there is no "Edit links" link. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexandre.rozanov (talk • contribs) 11:03, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 15 January 2023

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2404:0:823A:F8AB:FA30:D57B:294D:7409 (talk) 08:46, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Cannolis (talk) 09:10, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Inline links (links in the text of the article)

Question: Though point #1 says it is "best practice", is anything wrong with preferring to use point #5 (or even #6), especially if you don't like redlinks showing up? -- Carlobunnie (talk) 19:44, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Red links are not evil. Using the methods shown in #5 or #6 will confuse some readers clicking on those links, and they negate the benefits of red links. IMHO, those points ought to be removed from this guideline. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:07, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

This situation is as good a reason to have a red link as any. Unless the article in the other language is bad but it hasn't been deleted because it's been overlooked by patrollers, the fact that another language's Wikipedia carries on article on the subject coupled with the fact that an editor here finds the information worth linking to even though it isn't in English is as good a reason as any to want to flag the nonexistence of an article in English and encourage the creation of one. Largoplazo (talk) 02:17, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

I am going to agree with Carlobunnie and disagree with both Michael Bednarek and Largoplazo. Modern browsers do a good job of translating, so it really does not matter what language the article is in. While 10-20 years ago a page in another language would not be useful, those days are past (and the browser translations are going to continue to improve). I noticed that the "best practices" was introduced on July 25th 2022 by Loginnigol, see here. I do not see any discussion of this on a talk page. While I might be missing the discussion, at first sight this appears to not be a concensus decision.

Proposal: remove the "best practice" from point #1. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:32, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose – Using the template {{Interlanguage link}}, or much more commonly {{ill}}, is the superior method because it creates a red link while the English article doesn't exist which will turn blue once it does. After that, a bot will eventually remove the template coding. All other methods overleaf ought not to be used in articles. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 14:44, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
• Make option 1 a rule (with exceptions) seeing how most experienced users have a consensus that Template:Ill is the preferred option (see recent discussion at WT:WikiProject Physics#Links to people), I think this article should reflect that. I tried for example to suggest that Template:Ill should have an option to remove the red link, but the responses at WP:WikiProject Templates and Template talk:Ill show that this might not be an option because we seems to agree that the current article H:FOREIGNLINK says that {{Ill}} is option 1. Thus, I agree with users here that under the current format of this article, we are leaving wiggle room. Users that favor ill will point to this article, users that do not like red links will points at the other 8 options in this article, the article seems to be favoring both sides. My proposal would be to remove the options make it clear that {{ill}} is the main practice and open a subsection of alternatives in specific cases.--ReyHahn (talk) 08:53, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  I will add a comment here that I have also made elsewhere -- browser translation is moving fast, so conclusions from as little as a year ago may already be obsolete. I routinely look at foreign pages, both inside and outside Wikipedia; a few days ago I used a ChatBot to get software help on a Korean page. The lines between different language Wikis is probably already blurred, and will get more so within a few years. While redlining non-English was appropriate in the past, my crystal ball says it is Gen X/Y. Ldm1954 (talk) 09:46, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  Got to say I'm very doubtful that all non-English Wikipedias can be treated equally. While a specific German article might be up to standard that's certainly not going to be the case in all instances, especially some of the Wikipedia versions that are on their last legs. Much more likely that a few (perhaps just one) will dominate and the others will fall by the way side. Anyway I don't see what the point has to do with the issue here, which is that redlinks should remain if they can "plausibly sustain an article" which seems to be the case here. Nigej (talk) 10:52, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  The original point was that if there already exists a good article, then, for instance German: Daniel J Alpert is useful and that page is useful for readers. Alternatively Daniel J Alpert (in German). It has to be a good article but the same holds for an english language link -- we have all avoided using ones which are dubious. That is something's editors must decide. Ldm1954 (talk) 11:09, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  Under the current version of the article, Ldm1954 is right there are other options. However the consensus is clear {{ill}} should be used and the red links are better than hidden links. My point here is that the current version of the article is not supporting this consensus.--ReyHahn (talk) 11:19, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  Indeed, while other options are allowed, if the option used is "challenged" then surely the "best practice" at H:FOREIGNLINK must be used unless there's a good specific reason not to. Nigej (talk) 11:28, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  The 'best practice' is the only one consistent with the manual of style (MOS:INTERWIKI). The text here should be changed to reflect that. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 14:03, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  Moreover, the list of options should include just "leave a red link without any inter-language alternative", which is also an entirely fine variant for an editor to decide to use. –jacobolus (t) 14:12, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose Much better to make it clear that option 1 should be used except in rare situations. Several of other options should probably be removed as bad practice. Nigej (talk) 10:45, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose. It makes no sense whatsoever to obscure the fact that there is no English language article. "I don't like red links" is simply not a valid reason either to modify this help topic or to make changes in the already very complex {{ill}} template. older ≠ wiser 17:36, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

This talk section is about a question from Carlobunnie. As part of their response, Ldm1954 then created a proposal mid-section.

Let me provide my opinion, but first, my reply to the original question. There is nothing wrong with using #5 or #6 (if there were, we wouldn't be including them in the list). However, "not liking redlinks" is a poor motivation. Redlinks are a good thing, not something to be avoided. If you have a legitimate use case for #5 or #6 go ahead and use those, but if your only reason to avoid #1 is the red link, you might want to read up on what red links are and how they are useful.

More generally I feel {{ill}} is subject to intense feature bloat pressure. The point is to inform the reader of the existence of a foreign-language Wikipedia article on a subject English Wikipedia currently lacks coverage of. To be helpful, that other article needs to be actually good. The purpose of ill isn't to index any and all foreign-language articles on the subject! That's what the Languages sidebar and Wikidata is for! To include a link in ill, you're supposed to think it will actually be helpful to the reader. A low quality article or minimal stub isn't worth linking to, since it will likely not be worth the reader's time. The ideal is to link to ONE other wikipedia project - the project with the "definite" article on the subject, such as that project's counterpart to our "Featured Article" status. (though since editors cannot always agree, the template has been extended to allow for more than one link).

The argument "browser translations are getting better" I don't understand. The best translation in the world won't help if the reader isn't informed the article exist. And I think it is a bad idea to present the ill link as a regular link as if it wasn't important to make the reader aware they have switched languages. I can only speak for myself, but I consider English Wikipedia a magnitude of reliability higher than the other languages I frequent. I would not want intra-project links to be indistinguishable from links to within English Wikipedia - even if the translation was flawless, which it most definitely isn't now, and likely won't be for some time to come.

This is about building English Wikipedia, and we do that best by clearly marking ill links, carefully hand-curating ill links to other languages, and retaining the red links (that prompt your fellow editors to create more articles)!

CapnZapp (talk) 19:38, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

I think I was not clear enough in my original post, I was objecting to the addition of the "best practice" clause which I think is not reader first. I completely agree with you that the "best translation in the world won't help if the reader isn't informed the article exist". In my opinion the [de] does not inform the reader -- how are they supposed to know that contrary to normal conventions the de links to an article on the person/topic? I consider {{ill}} to be editor-centric. It may be good for building English Wikipedia, less for the reader, WP:RF. I also think we need to look beyond just the English Wikipedia, smart translation is changing the world.

N.B., I am not sure where " not liking redlinks" comes from. I consider {{ill}} good for editors but clumsy for reader, that is different. My original post on this topic in WT:Physics#Links to people was all about providing reader first information, but I was outvoted on linking outside of Wikipedia. Ldm1954 (talk) 22:06, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

The reader is likely able to learn what the small [de] or [fr] means after the first or second time they encounter this practice. Just like they are able to learn what blue and red links mean. Readers aren't stupid. —Kusma (talk) 07:50, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Including red links is good for readers. It tells them "a human editor thinks this topic should have an English wikipedia article, but it currently does not". In some cases this will even inspire a reader to go write a new article. –jacobolus (t) 14:21, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Agree with Kusma, who said it succintly: "Readers aren't stupid." The Guardian and The Independent use red font for hyperlinks (example 1, ex. 2); the New York Times and Al Jazeera use underlined blue (ex. 1, ex. 2), and Washington Post and BBC News use underlined black (ex. 1; ex. 2). Is this a problem for anybody? No, it isn't; readers quickly pick up the local style, just like readers at Wikipedia who see '[de]' do, and learn what it means. I think this is a complete non-issue. I also think that the "what's best for readers" vs. "what's best for editors" is a false dichotomy, and that red links help turn the former into the latter, as jacobolus said, and in any case are good for both. As far as the bolded proposal: oppose. Mathglot (talk) 01:24, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Agree fully with CapnZapp. Avoiding red links is bad, but there are cases where using {{ill}} is awkward for other reasons, and in those cases, it is fine if the main authors of an article decide not to use it. —Kusma (talk) 07:53, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Given the fact that Template talk:Interlanguage link is still going on and previously uninvolved users still prefer {{ill}} over everything else. I think that independently of the motivation for this proposal, a counterproposal can be made. I think we should consider modifying the text in H:FOREIGNLINK to make {{ill}} be the default option, and the rest of the options to be used only if there is an excuse not to use {{ill}}. This seems to be the consensus so far and the current wording stil leaves the door open to editor preferences.--ReyHahn (talk) 14:21, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm on board with that. Support. Mathglot (talk) 05:38, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Can't add link to Japanese ESOP article

There's a Japanese language version of this article at https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESOP but I'm unable to add Japanese as a language to this article because it says the Japanese article is already being linked to by another item. 60.102.232.135 (talk) 14:15, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Our article Employee stock ownership links to ja:ESOP and vice versa. What's the problem? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 14:21, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Can't remove an erroneous Interlanguage link

Was looking up the article on the German railway line Gäubahn railway line in SW Germany. It seemed pretty brief, so clicked the ILL for German looking for more info, which links to de:Gaubahn (note the lack of the ä-umlaut), which is an article to a different rail line in south central Germany along the Baden-Württemberg/Bavarian state border. The French link is also to the fr:Gaubahn.

I tried to remove the Gaubahn links from the ILL table, but then figured out it is the English link which is wrong. The ILL set is for the Gaubahn. There is no English language article for this railway line. However, the Gäubahn exists in both French and German (as well as Italian, Dutch, and Japanese). When I tried to remove the en link from the Gaubahn ILL, I get an error message that it cannot be removed unless the article has been deleted. The article is fine, but the link is to a different topic.

So, ... would someone smarter than me please fix this? The English language Gäubahn article ILL needs to be deleted from the de:Gaubahn/fr:Gaubahn ILL menu, and added to the de:Gäubahn/fr:Ligne de Stuttgart à Singen/etc. ILL for the Gäubahn Bilhartz (talk) 14:50, 28 March 2024 (UTC)