Wikidata/Notes/Language fallback: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:43, 14 August 2012

Revision as of 11:58, 14 August 2012

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In the case of Wikipedia clients, the most important fallback chain will be provided by the client. When a user changes the user interface language, on most Wikimedia foundation projects (known exception: Commons) and most (all?) Wikipedias, only the user interface changes, but not parts of the content. Changing the content of infoboxes in cases where the user language preference conflicts with the content language of the Wikipedia might be surprising. A decision whether this is ultimately desirable would probably have to be left to the community of each Wikipedia.

The fallbackbase chainbehaviour maywould therefore be, efallback chains that start with the language of the Wikipedia (= the wikidata client).g., 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==