User talk:Fabrickator/interlanguage link discussions

Hi, Fabrickator, I didn't understand your second paragraph in this comment at Template talk:Interlanguage link about the 2% stat. As the discussion is getting rather long, I didn't want to derail just to request a clarification there, so doing it here. What I meant about the stat, was that the {{para|qid}} param is used in [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%3A+hastemplate%3Aill+insource%3A%2F%5C%7C+*qid+*%3D%2F&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&fulltext=1 fewer than 2,915] cases, which is < 2% of all [https://templatecount.toolforge.org/index.php?lang=en&namespace=10&name=Interlanguage_link#bottom 201,000 ill transclusions]. (Note: the '2,915' value is an upper bound; the actual value is several hundred lower, because a handful of other templates also have a {{kbd|qid}} param, like {{tl|Wdtable row/island}}, {{tl|interwiki extra}}, {{tl|Rotten tomatoes}}, {tl|Metacritic film}}, and some others, and they are also showing up in the results of that search link, although they are a minority. It is possible to exclude them to get a better/lower value—and I did so in another search, just to make sure—but the Cirrus regex syntax is squirrely and would just make most people's eyes glaze over, so for a value only affecting the result by a few tenths of a percentage point, I judged it better to leave a simple link that overstates the count somewhat, slightly to the detriment of my argument, but not by enough to matter.) Anyway, could use assistance in understanding your point. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:37, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::{{ping|Mathglot}} You wrote:{{blockquote|It is possible to retrieve a single wikidata link given the qid and lang code, and I believe it is possible to retrieve a list of all links given the qid. If that pans out, then we could suppress the wikidata link in the template by testing if 'en' is the only link in the set.}} I'm just generally replying to this concept of the fact that Wikidata maps a qid to a set of articles in each of various languages, and depending on one's perspective, this should be mapped into either a single article (i.e. the best of these articles, regardless of language), a proper subset of those articles, or the full set of those articles. However, we're already doing this for all articles which exist on enwiki, with the links displayed either in the left margin or a link to a list of languages on the upper right-hand side of the page (presumably dependent on the skin you're using).

:So fight this out. If your preference of selecting some proper (presumably small) subset wins out over just listing the complete set, then I'll have to figure that my thinking doesn't apply to this wikiverse. Convince the enwiki community to agree on showing no more than the top two or three language versions for each article (and of course, keep up with the changes as community opinion changes as to which are the best, for whatever reason). If you aren't seeing that list (or a link to that list), then perhaps that has something to do with the skin you're using. Fabrickator (talk) 04:03, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:: Given your comment at the article, and your response above, I think we are talking completely at cross-purposes here, which likely explains why I did not understand your comment. And frankly, I think you have fundamentally misunderstood what is being discussed at the article, which would completely explain my confusion at your responses. But maybe I have it completely upside-down and am all wrong. So, let's find out.

:: If I understand you correctly now, you are talking about the wikidata links to foreign Wikipedia articles that are found in the language sidebar (or language dropdown, depending on skin and editing s/w choice) that link to the corresponding article on foreign Wikipedias, is that right? And finding yourself nonplussed that anyone might argue there should be only one such link, or perhaps just a few of them. Is that a roughly accurate reading of your comments? (If not, the rest of this message is moot.) If so, my comment, and indeed the entire discussion, has virtually nothing to do with that. It is due, perhaps, to an overloading of the term wikidata link, which can mean two things: the language sidebar/dropddown links, or the link emitted by the {{tl|ill}} template. In the discussion, it means only the template link, never the sidebar/dropdown links. Does that make sense?

:: The talk page discussion was originally about two questions. Consider the following {{tl|ill}} template {{ill|Luigi Madonis|qid=Q4274331|v=sup}}:

::* Q1: what about that 'wikidata' label? Is it too long, should it be just 'd' or 'wd' or something else?

::* Q2: the pop-up says, {{xt|Wikidata list: "Luigi Madonis articles in other languages"}}, but should it say 'other languages' or something broader, perhaps 'other project pages'?

:: Most of the interesting discussion has been about Q2. Given the original purpose of the template, some question whether there should be a wikidata link visible at all if no foreign language Wikipedia articles exist, but only sister project links, like WikiSource, or WikiQuote, as in the OP example:

::* :{{ill|William Richard Hughes|qid=Q117194259|lt=William R. Hughes}}

:: The comment of mine you quoted above, provides a theoretical approach to how one achieve this, i.e., emit the Wikidata link (or whatever it's called) only when at least one foreign Wikipedia article exists and is linked via Wikidata, and suppress the link when English Wikipedia is the only Wikipedia article. Does this make sense?

:: In particular, my comment has nothing to do with the sidebar/dropdown, or what links should or shouldn't be there. It was an attempt to offer a specific solution to an objection by a commenter to visualizing the [wikidata] link emitted by the {{tl|interlanguage link}} template. (By "the [wikidata] link", I mean the ten literal characters {{kbd|[wikidata]}} and the hyperlink underlying it output by {{tl|ill}}.)

:: You said:

::: {{talk quote|So fight this out. If your preference of selecting some proper (presumably small) subset wins out over just listing the complete set, then I'll have to figure that my thinking doesn't apply to this wikiverse.}}

:: Cross-purposes again? I can't tell. What are you referring to, here? If you are referring to the sidebar/dropdown, I would not *dream* of limiting the language dropdown or sidebar to the top article, or the top few, and I can't imagine on what grounds anybody would argue for such a thing. (In fact, it appears to be limited for space reasons, with a link available to "all the rest".) Is that what you meant? On the other hand, if you are talking about limiting the number of links emitted by the template, they are already limited to twelve, and I find it hard to imagine a case where that would be useful in an article. (Perhaps just maybe, in some extreme situation on a Talk page, by some data geek trying to illustrate a point; but then they should probably be building a table of links instead, and not limit it to twelve.)

:: The entire discussion is about the '[wikidata]' link emitted by the template (those ten literal characters, the pop-up, and the link) and nothing else. Are we at all on the same page, or have I entirely misunderstood you? Mathglot (talk) 06:16, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:::{{ping|Mathglot}} I'm going to suggest you take a look at how this is handled on Polish wikipedia. Let's see if I can summarize this in a few points:{{blockquote|

::* Any link for which there's no local entry but which has a wikidata entry (presumably with an article on at least one Wikipedia, the list of the available languages is easily viewed.

::* The list is dynamically updated as the availability of versions in different languages changes.

::* In the event that the set of languages becomes empty, it will indicate this when you click on the link.

::* Of course, doesn't matter if the page name changes, because linking is all based on the Wikidata id.}}

:::The general expectation is that if there is no foreign language version, you ordinarily don't use the {{tl|ill}} template, both as a performance issue and as a "principle of least surprise" issue (because the presence of the "wikidata icon" suggests that the article exists, just not in the local language).

:::For example, examine :pl:Brisbane. There are lots of wikidata-based interlinks with the "Chinese" icon to indicate this.

:::So to be clear, this adopts the idea of relying entirely on Wikidata and eliminates any process of having to curate the links as the set of available languages changes. 04:57, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

I made a comment on this here: Template talk:Interlanguage link#Purpose of this template. Regards, CapnZapp (talk) 10:27, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::: Hi, {{u|CapnZapp}}. Yes, I remember that Polish ill model, and have discussed it before somewhere with {{u|Piotrus}} and a few other editors, I forget where. Up to a point, I like the model, but with a major change to fix a major downside, namely when the list has a lot of languages I don't know (or even, small wikipedias I don't trust), or just a lot of links in general; i.e., I don't want to see 32 links, or 187 links. My suggested fix, which would probably require a WM s/w change, thus needing to go on a community wishlist or something and gain the groundswell of approval that it will never attain, is to access the list of fave languages from my preferences which controls the list of links I see in the language sidebar currently, and display only the links from wd that match languages in my faves list, and skip the rest (or hide them, and let me visualize them with a click). That would actually be useful, but like I said, it will never be approved. There might be a way some clever user script writer could do it, and that would be useful, too, but that would mean nobody would have it by default.

:::: The other downside of the Polish system, much as I like their presentation style, is that I really do like the curated links, which is why I said if Kusma included Serbian, even though I don't speak it, I would consider looking.

:::: And finally, it would be very easy to sandbox a version that would leave the current rendering alone, that is, bracketed iso-639 codes in blue font, but change all the links from bringing up the foreign Wikipedia article, to bringing up the automatic English translation by Google translate instead. There is no chance of that being implemented (and I would !vote against it), *but* (big but here) I believe it would be possible to add a class to that element, and then alter one's common.css to change the foreign wikipedia link to a GG-translate link instead using the same technique I used in the current sandbox to create the version for Andy which changes the appearance of the wikidata link, but that he didn't like. That would leave no visible change to the rendered page for anyone using it now, but allow you to swap out all your wikipedia-links for GG-translate links, which I think would be pretty cool, if I could get it to work.

:::: P.S., not sure we should be discussing this whole issue here, feels like we are hijacking Fabrickator's page, but it is worth discussing somewhere, so if you want to carry on, please either move this subsection back to Template talk:Ill, or somewhere else that makes sense. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 10:53, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::: I want ill links to be a curated list selected by the editor as part of improving the article text and thus the encyclopedia. As I see it, the ideal number of ill links is zero. Having an ill template with more than one language or maybe two probably means not using it for this purpose. I don't want the ill template to provide some nifty "because we can" functionality. It's not that I am a luddite that is against such functionality - its fine if and when it exists outside of the mainspace encyclopedia article text. Just to explain why I won't engage with any of those proposals. Best regards, CapnZapp (talk) 12:54, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::Since I was pinged, I'll just say that I still believe the way pl wiki handles this is superior to en wiki, and I don't see why we cannot implement it here. It's not idea, but it is better. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:05, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::: Housekeeping note regarding thread-author confusion: I replied at 10:53 to the post of 04:57, 19 March 2025 above as if it were written by {{u|CapnZapp}}, because that was the first userid I can see after that post. I now realize that the 04:57 post was authored by {{u|Fabrickator}} (diff). Apologies to CapnZapp if my response confused you, I was responding to the 04:57 post by Fabrickator. To Fabrickator: please be sure your userid appears in your sig, to avoid confusion and invalid responses. Thanks. Mathglot (talk) 23:51, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

: {{u|Fabrickator}}, responding to your post of 04:57, you said:

:: {{talk quote|this adopts the idea of relying entirely on Wikidata and eliminates any process of having to curate the links}}

: The template {{tl|Interlanguage link}} has always been about editors adding curated links since its inception. Removing that original functionality would be a big change, and invalidate about 200,000 transclusions present in articles now. If you believe that Template:Interlanguage link should rely entirely on Wikidata and eliminate the ability to include individual curated links, then you should propose that Template:Interlanguage link be deleted, and replaced by the former content of {{no redirect|Template:Interlanguage link Wikidata}}, and renamed to 'Template:Interproject link Wikidata]].

: Secondly, this is becoming more and more a parallel discussion to Template talk:Interlanguage link#Misleading tooltip; logo, and a user subpage is not the right venue to discuss important aspects of Template:Interlanguage link. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:52, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Did you have a question for me?

Also, your talk page really is getting very long.

Cheers CapnZapp (talk) 01:17, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Apparently not. Thanks, CapnZapp (talk) 10:28, 19 March 2025 (UTC)