International Mother Language Day 2021;International Mother Language Day 2021 - Label-a-thon
6 February 2021
Globe of language
International Mother Language Day 2021 is a mini Label-a-thon that is to be conducted on 6 February 2021. It will be one-day label-a-thon. CIS-A2K is going to organise it to celebrate "International Mother Day" of 2021. 21 February is the date for the same but we are celebrating in advance as the part of Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021, an online event which is to be organised on 19 February to 21 February 2021.
Although the examples given are in English, these guidelines are intended to be language-agnostic and mostly India-oriented, so that they can apply to the labels/descriptions/aliases of any Indian language. You may also find Help:Label, Help:Description, and Help:Aliases useful.
Use the most common name of an entity for its label, and use any abbreviations or longer, official, or less common names as aliases.
e.g. "Gurgaon" is the English label for Gurgaon (Q238508), while "Gurugram" is an alias for that item.
e.g. "Delhi" is the English label for Delhi (Q1353), while "National Capital Territory of Delhi" and "NCT" are aliases for that item.
Any disambiguation information, whether dates or other major identifying characteristics, should be placed in the description unless it is particularly significant. This usually means that any parenthesized information that would ordinarily be at the end of a Wikipedia title and is not part of the original title of the entity should be absorbed into the description somehow.
e.g. until, heaven forbid, another massacre takes place in Jallianwala, the English label for Jallianwala Bagh massacre (Q208855) should remain "Jallianwala Bagh massacre", with no reference to when it happened in the label.
e.g. if there happened to be two enwiki articles with distinct Wikidata items about two versions of Jambalaya (On the Bayou) (Q1413414)—an instance where there'd be two parenthesized expressions next to each other for disambiguation—the portion "(On the Bayou)" would remain in the label for both items and the second expression (most likely of the form "{artist name} song") would go into the description.
Descriptions should not be too long; if you find yourself adding more information than would be needed to distinguish the entity you're editing from something else, you're probably writing too much.
e.g. it would not be sufficient to call Satsvarupa dasa Goswami (Q132162) just a 'guru', a 'poet', or a 'writer' in English, without the other two items also present; as there are lots of gurus, poets, and writers, more information for the description would be necessary in those cases.
Do not end a description with a full-stop (or danda "।", for those languages that use it). Descriptions are not meant to be complete sentences—they are intended to be small guides for distinguishing like-named items and as an initial bit of clarifying information otherwise.
When adding a description for an administrative territorial entity (state/district/subdistrict/town/village/city), identify the two levels of administrative division above it, only adding more levels if the top-most level may be ambiguous. (There is generally no need to identify anything larger than a country in such a description.)
e.g. Araria Block (Q12414138)'s English description is "community development block in Bihar's Araria District", identifying the two levels of administrative division (district and state) above it.
e.g. Domai (Q12431207)'s English description is "village in Araria District's Araria C.D. Block", identifying the two levels of administrative division (C.D. block and district) above it.
e.g. Jhumai (Q12429835)'s English description is "village in Barun C.D. Block in Bihar's Aurangabad District", identifying three levels of administrative division (C.D. block, district, and state) above it because omitting "Bihar"—the topmost level—would make the description ambiguous between the Aurangabad Districts of Bihar and Maharashtra (even if it is apparent that Barun C.D. Block is not in Maharashtra).
Do not insert information into the description that is volatile, biased, or controversial in any way.
e.g. Manmohan Singh (Q41914) was in fact the "13th Prime Minister of India" according to the English description, and this is very unlikely to change. If, back in 2013, he were the "current Prime Minister of India", "politician from the Indian National Congress" or even a "famous Indian politician", all of those would have had greater risks of becoming incorrect in the future—what if he wasn't the prime minister in 2015? what if he decided to leave the Congress? what if he were to become engrossed in scandal? (The description "Indian politician" would still be an unambiguous, neutral, non-volatile description of him, even if all of the previous hypothetical scenarios happened, he had retired from Indian politics, and had decided to become an artist or a yogi.)
e.g. it suffices for Virat Kohli (Q213854) to be listed as an "Indian cricket player"; listing any specific team he has played on in the past or plays on at present adds volatility and should be avoided.
You can include potential misspellings of the label as aliases, but be sure to 1) make sure that those misspellings can actually be found in the wild, rather than just anticipating such misspellings, and 2) at least keep spellings of the same word across item labels consistent, as a way of standardizing them.
e.g. keeping "Santhali" as an English alias for Santali (Q33965) is acceptable, and adding "Santhali Wikipedia" as an English alias for Santal Wikipedia (Q55950814) is acceptable to parallel the presence of the alias on the item for the language, but unless some organization uses the spelling "Santhali" in its name in English—for which using "Santhali" in the label would be appropriate—the alternate spelling should be avoided in any other labels that refer to the language and should be relegated to aliases.
e.g. in Bengali, the name of the French president elected in 2017 is properly rendered "এমানুয়েল মাক্রোঁ", but some misspellings of his name, including "এমানুয়েল ম্যাক্রন" and "ইমানুয়েল মেকরন", are found in newspaper articles. These misspellings should never be used for any labels that make reference to him—unless, as above, they are used in an organization's spelling of its own name—and should be relegated to aliases to help those who cannot spell it. (If the subject of an item renders its own name in some way counter to your own conception of how it should be rendered—e.g. আলি vs. আলী for "Ali" in Bengali—you should still defer to the way the item's subject renders it for a label.)
Do not add as aliases anything that is not notable on its own as a way to refer to the item's subject.
e.g. Shah Rukh Khan (Q9535) may have "King Khan", "SRK", and perhaps many other names by which people refer to him as aliases (be sure that they are actually used somewhere before putting them down!), but the names of his children should never be aliases on his item.
e.g. A. R. Rahman (Q108560) can have both "Allahrakka Rahman" and "A. S. Dileep Kumar" as aliass, as those are his full and birth names, but the item should not have names of his songs (such as "Latka Dikha Diya Humne") or any section headings in his Wikipedia article (such as "Musical style and impact of A. R. Rahman") as aliases.
Avoid adding honorifics and titles to the label for a person.
e.g. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (Q234898) does not need "His Holiness" in the label (or in any aliases, for that matter), and other titles such as "Major General" or "Sri(mati)" for others need not be added either.
Contribute via TABernacle
You can also contribute via TABernacle tool. Open tool by clicking here. The help page of this tool can be seen here: Help:TABernacle. After logging in you have to paste SPARQL query in the box. Then after adding columns, click 'Run' and enjoy editing!
In this Label-a-thon, a total of 24 participants edited 1,580 Wikidata items. They have made a total of 2,316 edits. 7 participants made no contribution. The participants with the most contribution are as follows:
WikiProject India has more than 50 participants and couldn't be pinged. Please post on the WikiProject's talk page instead.