Wikidata talk:WikiProject Cross Items Interwikis

Wikisource

The background to the Wikisource solution I have provided, is that on Wikisource, you can have several versions of one single text. What we agreed about when Wikidata was founded, was that each item related to such texts, only should have one sitelink. This because each version of the text could have different metadata (different authors, different publishing date etc). On Wikisource, we earlier were allowed to link to several pages from one page to several different pages in other projects. For example from the Swedish original text of the Finnish anthem "s:sv:Vårt land" to four different Finnish versions. With the installation of Wikibase client, that changed. Not even by hand, it was any longer possible to add several iw-links from svsource to fisource. The developers were not aware of how Wikisource used interwiki. That bug is now solved locally on svwikisource, if you use a specific css-class. The old kind of interwiki was mainly maintained by hand. The iw-bots available were normally not able to handle them. Therefor we were not aware on svsource that there were so many different versions of "Raven by Poe" in every project. Unfortunatly, when Wikibase client was installed on Wikisource, to few maintained what we had agreed on. To many users were too influenced by how Wikipedia uses Wikidata for interwiki. Many of our items were unfortunatly merged. It became impossible to win this editwar against these "mergers", since there is more work to split an item than to merge them. These "mergers" acted in good faith, they are not to blame. Now, with Arbitrary access, it becomes possible to start to use that system to create Interwiki again on Wikisource. When the "mergers" see that this system works, I hope they will stop merge our items.

Observe that there can be different policies in different Wikisource-project. What I have done here, cannot be added by fource to any Wikisource-project, not even the Swedish. We have not talked about it yet, not even on svwikisource. We also have to discuss how we solve multilevel-issues, like The Bible. One text on svwikisource can be regarded as an edition of the Swedish Karl XII-translation. But that translation can be regarded as revision of the 1541-translation. And that is a Swedish translation of one of Martin Luthers German translation. And the Luther-bible is a translation of the Latin Vulgata. Etc until you reach as close to the original as you can. My question here is how deep in all of these levels we should go to gather all editions of The Bible on Wikisource. This is not limited to The Bible, already Raven by Poe can be regarded as having that problem. My module does not solve that problem at all today, I need help with that. One thing my Module solves, is the Interwiki sorting order. It looks different on svwikisource, than many other projects. When new projects emerge, the Module has to be updated. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 16:52, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Module:Interwiki on Wikisource

@StevenJ81: I have not used this module anywhere on Wikisource. I designed and tested it there, since that project had Arbitrary Access before any Wikipedia-project, which I know the language of, had it. The Wikisource-module is in fact in a personal Sandbox. The name "Lavallen" is my former username, named after a closed train station at Ådalen Line (Q1799633). My present username is from a main character in Flushed Away (Q752301). -- Innocent bystander (talk) 06:54, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikimania 2016

Only this week left for comments: Wikidata:Wikimania 2016 (Thank you for translating this message). --Tobias1984 (talk) 12:06, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Chemistry

Over at enwp's WikiProject Chemicals, there is an ongoing discussion in which Bonnie and Clyde issues keep popping up, particularly in relation to steroisomers, mixtures and salts (e.g. search for "cis-(+)-vernolic acid or "cis-(-)-vernolic acid"). --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 10:06, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

not entirely clear to me what the problem is, but would the issue there be resolved if wikidata could (formally) link to redirects? ArthurPSmith (talk)

Plant names (and probably many other areas) are a mess

This thread, copied from en:WP Help desk, gives a fine example.

Interlanguage mess

What the English call "chicory", the French call "endive". What the English call "endive", the French call "chicorée". That's straightforward enough. But when we check Wikipedia's interlanguage links, we find

• Chicory and Cichorium intybus link to each other.
• Cichorium and Chicorée link to each other.
• Endive links to Chicory, without a reciprocal link.
• Endive has no interlanguage link to a French, or indeed any foreign, article.

There are several problems here, which are certainly not restricted to this genus of plants.

• en:WP does not allow two articles to have interlanguage links to the same foreign article, though fr:WP evidently does.
• Sometimes an interlanguage link connects a vernacular name (like "endive") to a botanical name (like "Cichorium intybus"), or vice versa, even when a more appropriate target is available.
• Sometimes an appropriate target isn't available, instead the target article we would like to link to is a redirect, or doesn't exist.

This is the kind of mess that I enjoy working on, even though my French isn't great. What would be the best place to discuss these issues? Maproom (talk) 09:48, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi, Maproom. This problem has been much discussed on Wikidata: See d:WD:BC. I wouldn't know either chicory or endive if they came up and bit me in the leg, but I remember reading somewhere years and years ago that what the English call 'chicory' the Americans call 'endive', and vice versa. --ColinFine (talk) 10:14, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I think it's rare to discuss where specific interlanguage links should go. Editors just make the changes they want. Nearly all interlanguage links are made at the Wikidata item for the page. Click "Wikidata item" under "Tools" to see it (assuming it has one). Wikidata demands a one-to-one correspondance between pages, and a page can only be in one Wikidata item. But a few interlanguage links are made by editing the article itself instead of its Wikidata item. fr:Endive has the code [[en:Chicory#Cultivated]]. Such links are generally at the bottom. See Help:Interlanguage links#Local links. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:17, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

So there's also a American/British language problem contributing to the mess. That hadn't occurred to me. The articles Chicory and Endive seem closer to British usage than American. Thank you, PrimeHunter, for explaining how the non-reciprocal link was created.

I think I'll try cautiously to untangle some of this particular mess, and see how it goes. Maproom (talk) 11:18, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

I started by deleting the link from FR "Chicorée" to EN "Cichorium". That worked. Then I tried to add a link from FR "Chicorée" to EN "Endive" – but I got the error message "The link enwiki:Endive is already used by item Q28604477. You may remove it from Q28604477 if it does not belong there or merge the items if they are about the exact same topic." So I looked for a French article on "Q28604477", and got the message that there isn't one: "L'article « Q28604477 » n'existe pas sur ce wiki ! ". I'm clearly out of my depth here. Maproom (talk) 15:31, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

I think the help of ordinary editors will be needed to help sort out such messes. But while few of us know how to help, the messes may be around for a long time. Maproom (talk) 15:48, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Maproom, the designation "Q28604477" doesn't refer to an article in any Wikipedia but to a Wikidata item, Q28604477 which is labelled "endive" in English (and also labelled in Croatian and Italian), and linked only to the English article en:Endive. The French article fr:Chicorée is linked from the different Wikidata item Q158514, labelled "Cichorium" in English, and linked to the English article en:Cichorium as well. I'm not sure where you deleted a link: neither that French article nor the Wikidata item has been edited this month. So fr:Chicorée is still linked (via Wikidata Q158514) to English en:Cichorium, and you won't be able to link it to another English article. I've looked at your contributions in Wikidata and both enwiki and frwiki, and I can't find the edit you say you made to delete the link. --ColinFine (talk) 19:04, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, ColinFine, for looking into this. I'm sure I did delete the link, by clicking on "Modifier les liens" at Chicorée. Then after I found I couldn't replace it by the link I wanted, I put it back as it was. But don't worry about it. I'm even more sure that I'm out of my depth here, and shall keep away from this stuff in future. Maproom (talk) 07:15, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Experiment status

TL;DR: Interwiki extra template (e.g. enWp) should be made known to everyone! Right?

I'm new to WD, but I immediately learned that Wp users mostly think it's about interwiki links and that many merge requests are not accepted while others are still open. Help:Sitelinks says "in cases when more than one item could reasonably correspond to the same Wikimedia page, it is likely that the items should be merged together." enWp is also instructing WD changes without any deeper consideration of why WD items were separated to begin with.

To me it seems that making it more clear that each Wp can choose their own interwiki links would be a good thing. Local links are now rarely considered. Isn't "Interwiki extra" what everyone asks for, without knowing about it? Relaxing the need for each language Wp to enforce their article structure onto WD should IMHO be high prio and nothing happens. Best part of "interwiki extra" is that its already available (on many Wp) and only require communication.

@TomT0m: It has been more than a year since you added experiment status to this page. What is current status? As far as I could see (in randomly chosen article) the template is still in use an fully functional in enWp.

@Innocent bystander: I can also see that svWp har plenty of usage and it seems to be well understood by admins, though I haven't looked for any instructions on how to use it. Did you hear any complaints?

Anyone: Did you meet resistance from community? Notably deWp is not in the list? Do you also suggest an automatic variant (without the "extra")? Any last changes you want done before wider release? Willing to deal with questions? How do you propose to spread the word? I'd suggest first checking with WD "interwiki conflict" group that they understand the idea enough so they can promote it as a conflict solution. With consensus update help pages. Write instructions how to bring template over to a new wiki and how to use it. It could later on be discussed if "extra links" should be marked in UI, say in separate section, but "more links" is the main request now.

I'm naive, of course... What do you think? Jagulin (talk) 07:22, 27 June 2019 (UTC)