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Wikidata:Requests for comment/Labels and descriptions in language variants

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An editor has requested the community to provide input on "Labels and descriptions in language variants" via the Requests for comment (RFC) process. This is the discussion page regarding the issue.

If you have an opinion regarding this issue, feel free to comment below. Thank you!


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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Tracked in Bugzilla
Bug 49024
Consensus to keep British English and Swiss High German. No consensus on Canadian English, Informal Netherland or Português do Brasil. Consensus to remove Formal-German (Deutsch-Sie Form) John F. Lewis (talk) 19:34, 31 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal

The Interface is available in a lot of subvariants for some languages like gb-en, us-en canadian-en or de-formal. This makes it also possible to add separate labels and descriptions for this variants additionally to en and de. This is sometimes confusing and adds unnecessary complexity and possible target for Vandalism to the items because most of the time the Labels are the same. Should we make it a rule to not add labels and descriptions for the following language variants? If there are no labels in this variants and someone uses this interface languages he still sees the normal English or German labels and descriptions, because they are the respektiv fallback.

Discussion

The above "he still sees the normal English or German labels and descriptions" is false. Try it with Q1075. English shows it as "color", but Canadian English gives you "colour". FrigidNinja 00:18, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Clarified thanks for pointing out the wrong wording.--Saehrimnir (talk) 01:24, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Also, there is no fallback from a language variant to the normal language. For example, if my language is British English (en-gb) and I am viewing an item that does not have a label or description in en-gb, it will just show empty fields, not the en version. The Anonymouse (talk | contribs) 07:10, 4 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for clearing this up. By intuition I always thought that language fallbacks were of course implemented for language variants. – Turns out the multi-language aspects of Wikidata are in quite a messy state. -- Make (talk) 17:46, 19 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I would think that we would want to avoid adding labels for wikis which don't exist. So that would be pt-br, en-ca, etc. Where necessary, aliases should be used to clarify spelling as necessary (en vs. en-br for example; the name of the page on the wiki should dictate what the name of our page is). It might be a problem when we start to integrate the Wiktionaries, though. --Izno (talk) 01:29, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Liangent has proposed a Google Summer of Code project to implement language fallback and conversion. E.g. if your preferred language is Canadian English, you will see some other English when that is not available. I believe the "conversion" part involves things like transliterating between Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Superm401 - Talk 03:11, 5 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Canadian English

British English

  •  Keep Even if there is no British Wikipedia, I support having labels in that often surprisingly distinct language. --Tobias1984 (talk) 10:16, 3 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Keep It's not just vocabulary, but also formatting. And there are many articles written in British English. Aurora (talk) 05:49, 4 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Keep --FelGru (talk) 13:55, 4 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Keep -- Too many differences from other dialects of English to throw out. TCN7JM 20:43, 4 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Neutral  Keep I would really like to see some fallback mechanism developed and enabled so that a British English variant needs only be entered when it differs from "en" -- Make (talk) 17:33, 19 May 2013 (UTC) – Changed to neutral per the reasons given by Andrew below. While it seems desirable to support language variants in the long run, the user experience right now is so bad that it might be wiser to turn variants off until proper fallback mechanisms are available. Not to forget modifications to the user interface so that cases where labels etc. are stored in language variants, this circumstance is easily discoverable. -- Make (talk) 13:53, 29 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Neutral There are good reasons for keeping it, but simply saying "keep" won't improve things. While being able to see that Property:P462 is "colour" is nice, reading Wikidata with en-gb set is often horrible - broken labels everywhere, outdated descriptions that were updated in en but never carried over, and no obvious indication that what you're seeing isn't what anyone else is seeing. Any changes you make (eg to "also known as") will stagnate and not benefit the bulk of English users. Meanwhile, well over 95% of the time, en = en-gb = en-ca = en-us; there's simply no reason not to synchronise by default.
The tools for synchronisation aren't a nice-to-have option; they're essential if we're to keep en-* variants. If we won't have these tools soon, we should make it clear that using it is going to have a bad user interface - and we absolutely need to disable the "View Wikidata in British English" banner that appears for unregistered users geolocated to the UK. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:23, 28 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Formal-German (Deutsch-Sie Form)

The only difference for de-formal is the way the user is addressed (help pages, etc.). Since item labels and descriptions don't address anyone, there aren't even any possible differences. —★PοωερZtalk 12:00, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Swiss High German (Schweizer Hochdeutsch)

Nederlands (informal)

Português do Brasil

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.
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