Been a little while since I last wrote a blog, this time the focus is on interwiki.
To many people, interwiki's are just those links on a page you will never click. You're hear to read in English and that it.
Our users here on the English are a cultural mishmash. I can state for a fact we have Italians, French, Portuguese and Brazilian users. Some of the content we place in our articles might be easier to read in a native language. That does mean they are leaving our site, but if the content is there, in their native language it is someone who remains in the community. For me that is more important than getting that one click, its about drawing someone in and keeping them as part of the project.
We, as a community are important to the international editing community for a number of reasons:
- Some wiki's translate our content.
- Some wiki's rely on the technical experience we have.
- Some rely on our file repository.
Content to translate and technical experience can be compensated for outside of the community. The files however, are something we must take responsibility for.
Why is the file repository important?[]
In a nutshell: Any file we modify here impacts the other Fallout wikis that are using the shared repository. Every file replacement, move and deletion we do directly impacts articles on the international wiki's. We break stuff and fairly often. I once spent an evening going through Special:Wantedfiles on the Portuguese wiki, fixing all those broken file names. The biggest reason for this is that the damage is invisible to us, the shared repo does not tell us where else the file is used, so interwiki's are easy to miss
To this end, I have created a new template, {{Shared repository}} to help us identify which wiki's use that file before we commit to a move or deletion. From here we can jump to the Special:Whatlinkshere page for the relevant interwiki's and see what we need to change elsewhere. This does mean a little extra work for the interwiki's, the addition of the relevant tag for their wiki, however in the long term we can take some burden off them by fixing as we go along.
What else can I do to help[]
If you speak another language, feel free to contribute to that wiki. Even if you make one translation a day then 6 or 7 smaller edits here, or hang about here for the people and work over there it doesn't matter. As someone once said to me "we are working towards the same goal".