File talk:Керамика Золотой Орды ГИМ.JPG

About interwiki links

Hi, since we do not agree on that, rather than editing again, I've asked a question on the village pump about interwiki policies on commons. --Eusebius (talk) 06:31, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Hi, I appreciate your concern. I will not participate yet to the debate on the village pump as I don't want to influence it in the first round. The debate concerning IW to cats or articles comes back every now and then without conclusions.

Concerning the IW's on the images, I have a preference because of the nature of the job I am doing a lot here. When receiving an image containing a description wich contains next to nothing or in a foreign language that I don't understand at all or hardly can understand, then every help to understand the context is welcome.

So a first help is the places where that image or similar images are used, which you can find indirectly if you use IW's. (The toolserver is very slow and fails 30 % of the time) So, I would certainly suggest that transfer or categorisation bots include those IW's.

Often, IW's can only be used that point in one direction, in this case Golden Horde where the image was used. One could defend other directions, such as Mongolian or Russion history, pottery, museum in Moscow, ... Anyway, when other images land in the same category with IW's pointing to other directions, we can slowly build a more complete context and improve linking with other categories.

Anyway, this type of information is extremely valuable in setting up the right categories (and their IW's) and their connections with other categories (as for the new category Golden Horde I did create). Moreover, this type of information exists in much more languages than the ones you used in the description, facilitating for example the access to Korean or Japanese speakers, without cluttering the page with long texts. By the way, you did an excellent job in rewriting the image description; I cannot afford to do that on the images I try to categorise. Question is: does it makes sense to do that in many languages and in how many ? (where IW's are complementary)

I admit that once an image is categorised in a mature, documented (?) and populated category, those IW's are less useful, but they don't harm neither. I think that if you try to work a couple of days on uncategorised images or unconnected categories, you will better understand my standpoint.

But for sure, in a properly categorised, mature and documented category system, IW's on the images are only a detail. --Foroa (talk) 09:50, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

I have worked for some time on uncategorised stuff on other projects and I perfectly understand your reasons. Yet, I still think that it is not the right cure for the problem: IWs are supposed to be 1-to-1 relations (and meta-wiki guys are working on IWs with that point of view), whereas cats and links are 1-to-many, and thus more adapted here (although they need more clicks for the user to get to the useful page in her language).

I am not against IWs in image page in the principle, but only when this 1-to-1 relation can be established. Actually, I think only VIs should have IWs pointing to articles corresponding to their scope. It would look like a nice policy to me. IWs in the way you've put them on this image page are questionable in the sense that one could find it more natural to make them point towards another article (as you said).

Regarding multi-language descriptions (and multi-language meta-info in general), the multi-language issue is a deep problem on Commons and I will not debate on it! I do what I can when I decide to improve the meta-info of an image, that's it... --Eusebius (talk) 10:55, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

I will come back on that later when I have more time. In the light of a growing, evolving, maturing categorisation system (which is growing and evolving on all the wikipedia's too), it is not realistic to expect a one to one relation. I think even that some ways of grouping images in categories will give place to new categories and articles in the Wikipedias. If you look at the wikipedia's, you will see that they only discovered the value of a category system since a year or so, so they will evolve quickly too and most probably in a different way than here. Concerning the multi-language aspects, we have already a partial solution that helps to some extent, so why throwing it away ? --Foroa (talk) 11:14, 1 October 2008 (UTC)