Andreas Kolbe wrote: > I used the interwiki links all the time in this manner at work, and still do. > It was one of the things that turned me on to Wikipedia and caused me to > start contributing, and eventually to register an account. > > As others have said, if the interwiki links had not been visible by default, > I likely would not have discovered the feature, or discovered it only much > later. > > An interesting thing is that even if the interwiki articles were poor, or > incomplete, there was usually enough context provided to pick out the key > terms in the field in the relevant languages, providing a starting point for > further research and confirmation in and outside of Wikipedia. Extremely > useful. > > There is another way in which the interwiki links are useful. We need to remember that an article in one language is often developed without reference to the corresponding article in a different language. They are written quite independently from each other, and thus can give different perspectives on the same subject, or highlight different aspects of the same subject. In a controversial topic the differences could be startling.
Given the availability of translations that are just a click away, not even a native English speaker has to fear that clicking on an interwiki link will produce an unintelligible page. There could even be value to a double list which gives the option of viewing the other language article in its original form or in its machine translation. Ec _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
