Last modified: 2012-12-13 11:17:11 UTC
When adding new interwiki links it is not obvious that you can only add links to articles that actually exist. This needs to be made more obvious.
Hmmm.... this behavior could be an issue. [ Example of workflow where the langlink is created before the target article ] When I request an article translation from en. to fr. instead to translate it myself, I go to en., get the information I need, open the article to copy/paste the introduction (which I'll translate on fr., so potential translators get an idea of the topic), add the fr. langlink, save and then click on the French link to create the article. [ Integrity note ] To only allow langlinks to existing articles have several advantages to keep data integrity : - reduce error risk on manual input (typo, two languages confusion, etc.) - for Wikipedia: block a tricky way some contributors use to give a false impression of "articles already present on plenty of other projects": they put langlinks to a dozen Wikipedia projects, and surprise, it doesn't exist elsewhere!
Dereckson, the workflow you use is a bit more complicated in the case an article of that name already exists. You are linking to it, click on it, and you will see it at that moment that you probably need to disambiguate. Now, since you are already on fr.wp, you will check which alternative or disambiguated name is free. You go back to en.wp, edit in order to change the article name appropriately, and then paste the English intro and translate it or let someone translate it. Indeed, such a workflow would not work anymore. Instead it would work like this: 1. You are on en.wp and copy the intro text. 2. You go to fr.wp and create the article. 3. You paste the text and translate or let it be translated. 4. Still on fr.wp you edit the language links and add the link to the respective en article. The rest of the links will be pulled in from Wikidata. The major loss of convenience is in Step 2: you do not get a link that you can click on in order to get to the edit box for the article automatically. One way to circumvent this is to still add the link to the langlinks on en (since local one still work), but click on preview instead, follow the link, and continue with step 3. I hope that this is sufficiently fine as a workflow. Cheers, Denny
On a personal basis, yes, I'm fine and generally I prefer in those cases to write my self the target article URL directly. I mainly wanted to highlight with this example we break a previous working functionality and the advantages we got in exchange, in term of cost/benefits.
Thank you, it is very good feedback indeed and makes us rethink the workflow. The thing always is that editors are very resilient in coming up with workflows based on the abilities of the software and their configuration, and your original workflow is indeed very much something shaped by the current software and the way the Wikipedias are set up, and not something anyone would have designed up front. Your analysis is valid and valued, thank you.
Should have a warning or notice to say what's going on.
An error message is displayed now. The error message should be changed to something more understandable.
