Template talk:Wikipedia languages/Archive 1

message: The names in parentheses are meant to be transliterations, not translations!
Remember the purpose is to allow a language user to recognise the language, not to allow English readers to identify it.
It's an interesting idea, whether we might like to give translations for the benefit of English readers, but that's not what we've done so far.
-- Toby Bartels 20:55, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

message: ; Wikipedias with over 50,000 articles:  Nederlands (Dutch) – English – Français (French) – Deutsch (German) –  日本語 (Japanese) – Polski (Polish) – Svenska (Swedish)  
; Wikipedias with over 10,000 articles: Български (Bulgarian) –  Català (Catalan) – 中文 (Chinese) – Dansk (Danish) –  Esperanto – Suomi (Finnish) –  עברית (Hebrew) – Italiano (Italian) – Norsk, Bökmal (Norwegian) – Português (Portuguese) – Română (Romanian) – Русский (Russian) – Español (Spanish) – Українська (Ukrainian)
Complete list –
Multilingual coordination –
Start a Wikipedia in another language
With this kind of order, you see, things actually make sense. In the current one, we have it switching around from the proper alphabetical order of the English names to the native tongues. Example: We have German, English, French, Japanese, Polish, and Swedish, in that order. It is clearly not ordered on the English names, because German is first. That can be fixed if we use the German name: Deutsch. So, Deutsch, English, Français, Japanese... Japanese? No, it shouldn't be Japanese, it should be 日本語. And, because those sorts of letters don't appear in the Latin alphabet, Japanese should naturally come last then. But it doesn't. We switch to 'Japanese', and allow it to stay where it is.
There are many examples of this. After Esperanto is Español, which is Spanish. So, we're going by the language's name for itself. But, after that is Suomi. We just jumped implausibly from 'E' to 'S'. That's odd. Not so odd when you notice that Suomi's English name, Finnish, would come right after 'E'.
In any case, I've alphabetized correctly now, so, unless I made a few jarring mistakes, enjoy. ^ ^
EDIT: Another note on this template! It distinguishes between the two forms of written Norwegian: Bökmal and Nynorsk. Before, we had simply 'Norsk' (which is 'Norwegian' in both forms) and 'Nynorsk'. This method is better. Also, I did not put 'Nynorsk Norwegian' or 'Bökmal Norwegian' in parentheses for English speakers because the names are the same in English and Norwegian. It is very easy to distinguish for both Norwegian- and English-speakers. - Gavin
whatever happened to "The names in parentheses are meant to be transliterations, not translations! Remember the purpose is to allow a language user to recognise the language, not to allow English readers to identify it." (see top of this page) -- I don't think many people who don't recognize a language's name for itself will be interested in visiting its WP project... dab (ᛏ) 09:25, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proper English alphabetization 

message: Is there some agreement about minimum number of articles a Wikipedia project must have before it is allowed to be added to this section ?  Because if there is I missed it.  It seems to me that the level of activity for a Wiki is more important than the number of articles, particularly when a new language project has just started.  When I started contributing to the English Wikipedia it had few articles and poor coverage of just about every area.  However by publishing links to it we got more contributors, more activity and more content.  
That's why I'd like to see some discussion before links to other Wikipedia projects are removed from this section.  User:Sj's removals at the moment seem rather arbitrary.  After all a fifty article count doesn't make an encyclopedia much more useful than a five article count. Even if the interface isn't fully translated, a link is useful for attracting people to help. So why not leave them all in with the aim of getting more exposure and hence more activity. -- Derek Ross 23:33, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Amount of content needed before a page is listed on the Main Page 

message: I think the native word for the Cassubian language is "Kaszëbsczi." This seems to be the case, according to  (see the "content-language" thing at top-right). – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) w: 23:35, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Cassubian

message: According to Sanskrit, the Devanāgarī translation for the Sanskrit language is "संस्कृतम्". – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) w: 21:31, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Sanskrit

message: I don't know that I like taking those out of the lineup; I like being neutral about the size of the other WPs, and not trying to privilege the largest ones.  That said, if they /are/ to be separated from the rest of the langs -- let's say, to improve the image of WP's multilinguality -- they shouldn't be in order of size, but ordered the same way as the rest of the list.  +sj+ 19:31, 2004 May 6 (UTC)
*looks as if they are now not ordered at all (not alphabetically by name or code, not by size and not reverse by any criterium). IMHO it would be better if there was any ordering 195.93.66.5 21:41, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  'ten largest' section 

message: I am moving the Conlangs back into the main list for the following reasons:
# First of all, Tok Pisin isn't even a constructed language.
# Esperanto is a notable language because it contains over 12,000 articles in it's Wikipedia.
# It would seem wrong to tell the people who spent their time volunteering to make these Wikipedias that their languages aren't even real (which they are real).
# I feel like correcting it.
Hey, isn't there a Klingon wikipedia? That should be in the list too. Andre 04:28, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Anyone can edit the parts of the Main Page, it's just hard to figure out how for the average vandal. Andre 19:50, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Constructed Languages 

message: I like the new language setup too. Suggestion: How about another heading for Wikipedias that reach 100,000 articles? German is already there.
I'm about to put up a new template with commented-out space for a 100,000 heading with German under it. Not to worry: I've previewed the template, with German still visible under the 10,000 heading. I'm just putting it up so that the community can quickly put it in place if it sees fit. Dale Arnett 01:35, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Because the main page is already too crowded, and this section takes up A LOT  of room - as much as (if not more) than all the sister projects combined, plus the new articles and the donation banner. What you propose is only going to make a bad situation this worse. Furthermore, by breaking up the languages into a 4th section, it makes finding a particular language even hard now (with 4 alphabetical lists to go through instead of 3) →Raul654 06:07, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)
I checked out the Japanese Wikipedia's main page recently and I found out it had a 100,000-article heading. Scott Gall 08:53, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The 100,000-article mark 

message: I have a question: is there any reason why were using HTML entities instead of the actual character on this page? -- anon
The English Wikipedia (like a few other wikis) only works properly with Latin-1 characters. If you actually put (say) a Chinese character into the edit box, then it will be stored as an entity in the database. (Try doing that in the Wikipedia:Sandbox, or even in a preview, and you'll see for yourself that it's so.)
-- Toby Bartels 23:50, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Entities? 

message: This template has (yet again) ballooned back up in size to 100+ languages. Let me say this clearly - this is not a good thing. It takes up well over an entire screen length on my machine (1024x768 resolution). The full list of 200+ languages is already linked - we don't need to list most of them. The language list itself took up as much space as the entire content-section of the main page. That's very lopsided.  
: Could you say that more clearly?  (:  I'm adding langs with over 100 articles back in.  If you really want langs with over 30mil speakers to show up, please add them to that smallest list, perhaps changing the subsection title or with an asterisk next to the language name.
Furthermore, extra subcategories are bad - if someone is looking for a particular language, the more lists there are, the more work they have to do to find their language. →Raul654 16:17, Sep 4, 2004 (UTC)
: Thoughts on reducing subcats, while improving usability: all langs over 5000 (threshhold for more-than-bot-assisted rapid growth?) could be grouped together, and then all langs over 100 (threshhold for acceptable-browsing-esperience, with some meta- and help pages).  We could go back to bolding certain langs, but I don't like the way that displays.  Or we could slightly modify the text-color/greyscale/thickness of certain langs, which would suit my tastes better... +sj+ 19:48, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Size of this template

message: I call upon Wikipedians to vote as to whether or not to keep the english translations (in parentheses after the native name). Please provide your name and a brief justification for your vote. Alternatively, if you would like to revert to the former method of using latin script transliterations, there is that choice too. Nicholas 09:17, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discusion on parenthesized translations 

message: In other words, use Name in native script (Translation in english).
# AlanBarrett -- Displaying translations of foreign names seems quite appropriate in the English Wikipedia.  There is no hard space constraint.
# Toby Bartels -- On an English wiki, including the English name is reasonable. But we should alphabetise by native name (transliterated if necessary). Fall back to transliterations if this becomes too lengthy, but it looks OK now to me.
# Node 20:29, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Keep Translations 

message: In other words, use Name in native script, without any translation or transliteration.
# Nicholas -- Easier navigation; simpler, less chaotic-looking layout; allows room for "Wikipedias in need of attention" category
#: No, it doesn't allow room for said category since it would include around a hundred Wikipedias.
# Norm 11:27, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Remove Translations and Transliterations 

message: About these ranges that keep on appearing and quickly disappearing on this template: do we need a vote on this? Lately, Maveric149 and Node ue have been undoing each others' edits. (I'm inclined to agree with Node's point of view, but I'd like to see what everyone else thinks about this.) – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 21:40, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: It is simply not-accurate to not include all language versions with more than 100 articles in a list with that name. It is much better to say exactly what that list is. --mav 06:47, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: So what? People get the idea, only incessant nitpickers will notice there is anything to it and even then they probably won't care. The information is successfully transmitted by my version, it is less confusing, and yours presupposes that the reader is an idiot while mine does not. --Node 02:03, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: Mav, that's a bit silly, and we really don't need any 9999's. Nothing is unclear, and even the font sizes contribute to my intuitive understanding that some of the wikis are bigger than the others. Btw, I don't agree with the ranges; at 9999 articles, that's a 10K wiki we should put in the current first tier. ✏ Sverdrup 01:34, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: (Also, if you are really grumpy about this, let's look at it like a switch from C; since there is no {mono|break;}}, the upper tier includes all the languages in the list ;-P ✏ Sverdrup 01:36, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ranges 

message: the 'Other-langs2.png' icon may be useful on the mainpage (but if so, near the top, not next to this list), but it should not be in this template, as it shows up on Main Page (text only), now. dab (ᛏ) 09:59, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: icon

message: If we are going to have a 50 000+ section (something that i fully support) then the others should be in multiples of 5s aswell. 5000+ and 500+. I think this is a much better idea, since 5000+ is significantly more useful than 1000+ but not significantly less useful than 10 000+. also the 500+ allows for some of the smaller wikipedias to get some diserved free publicity (if theyve managed to get 500 that quite an achivment) with out having as many as a 100+ list would. It also makes the whole thing more uniform.
comprimise people, comprimise.
thats my two cents anyway.
The bellman 12:09, 2004 Dec 28 (UTC)
why not? we could drop the 10**n bins entirely and have 500+, 5000+, 50000+. would that make sense? the bins would be shifted back to 1000+, 10000+, 100000+ at some point in the future (maybe when four or five WPs reach 1E5) dab (ᛏ) 12:43, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I could live with that. --mav 20:30, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: I'd like to hear other input, but I think that a 10K encyclopedia is _a lot_ better than a 5K one, at least thinking about those I've seen. (This means, I like the 10K binges better) ✏ Sverdrup 03:43, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: 5s