Wikidata/Notes/Language fallback: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:51, 15 February 2023

Latest revision as of 19:51, 15 February 2023

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The base behaviour would therefore be fallback chains that start with the language of the Wikipedia (= the wikidata client). The fallback chain for a German Wikipedia might then be, e.g., "de -> en -> fr -> nl -> es -> it -> first-language-present". A necessary decision will be whether to provide a community-specific means to define and discuss this or whether only a large set of global fallback chains is centrally defined for each language that corresponds to a Wikipedia. To support community decision, a property "Property:language_fallback_chain" could be defined and set on the each item page inside Wikidata that represents a Wikipedia. This property information could then either be used live by Wikidata, or it could be harvested in regular intervals (similar to information from translation wiki).

==Support for fallback in the Wikidata editing interface==

A special problem occurs if a new value is entered in a language with a script that only a relatively small percentage of people read (and thus help to transliterate. An example is the name of a mayor in a city in Israel, the original name and spelling being hebrew, see mailing list: "[Wikidata-l] watching Wikidata changes that affect my wiki" of 14.8.2012.

Automatic transliteration is possible, but error prone. The Wikidata editing interface may therefore encourage (not force) editor in addition to enter information in the chosen language, to also enter transliterated and sometimes translated labels in one or several fallback languages. The list of fallback languages could be automatically determined by frequency of occurrence in fallback definitions (in practice, English will probably be the most frequent one).

The user interface interaction would require:

* a list of languages for which transliteration or translation is especially desired (if desired this step can be skipped, making this the default behavior for all languages)

* if a label is entered in one of these language, the software checks whether at least one label in one of the top 5 fallback languages is available.

* if not, it offers the 5 top fallback languages and prompts the user to consider entering at least one.

* In a second phase, a web service hook for automatic transliteration should be build in. The return of this service should not be entered directly as a new label, but could be displayed next to it ready to be accepted or modified.

[[Category:Wikidata]]