Category talk:United States

Bolding links to English versions of Wikimedia projects

In this category, for related Wikimedia links I bolded both English and Spanish to make those two languages the most prominent.

• English bolded as it is international lingua franca and de facto national language
• Spanish bolded as it is the second most common language in the US, with wide usage among federal and state agencies (USA.gov has a version in Spanish)

WhisperToMe (talk) 06:30, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Don't say that (about English, in a comment to every "bold" mark); because of English many people fail to use Commons. That rationale is absolutely redunant for the USA. --AVRS (talk) 07:21, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

You said "because of English many people fail to use Commons" - Based on my experiences on the Commons, the only reason why English would deter someone would be if he/she had no other option and felt trapped in being forced to use it. I notice this in the case of category names and how they are displayed. Well, I think what the Commons needs is a way for category names to be "displayed" in other languages to make it easier for people who do not speak English to use the Commons. The actual category name would be in English, but the name displayed for the category would be in another language, depending on user settings. But in the bolding of interwiki links, I don't think that having English bolded in addition to the local language will intimidate or stymie the Commons for anybody.

You observe that English is anyway the de facto national language for the USA. That's why I bolded Spanish - I did this to compensate for the fact that English is already the de facto national national language. So then Spanish becomes the "second" language for the USA.

Let's look at this - English inherently needs priority in addition to Italian. It is the global lingua franca and it is the most likely to be understood by any particular person. That's why it needs to be bolded in every category. If somebody doesn't know Italian, then English is the second preferred option.

WhisperToMe (talk) 07:17, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Some of those who cannot use Commons in English (But want to! Others probably just upload files to Wikipedia instead, with descriptions in their native languages and without bothering with reusability etc) ask for help. Apparently they can navigate through Commons (not necessarily through policies and templates), but they cannot defend their contributions against people who open English-only deletion requests or ask questions in English. --AVRS (talk) 10:15, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

"but they cannot defend their contributions against people who open English-only deletion requests or ask questions in English." - Would you mind stating some examples? I would imagine that the English-language contributors would certainly recognize this and ask for help from a person who does know the foreign languages. Isn't there a protocol for this? Also if it is recognized that the party does not know English, debates on deletion should be put on hold until proper translators are found. Also I have made many translation requests to get policy pages and templates/etc translated into other languages. For instance the California Public Domain banner needs a Spanish version (Spanish is widely spoken in California). User:Yasu got done translating two comics explaining licensing into Japanese, after I made a request for him to do it. WhisperToMe (talk) 22:27, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

I guess backlogs would be different if there was time and activity to postpone resolutions of files by non-English speakers.

User:Schekinov Alexey Victorovich is one user who doesn't speak English. E.g. this deletion may have been right, but I am not sure anyone has read the uploader's arguments. Here, he listed his (now defunct) website as the source. Does anyone read files' talk pages?

There was a user who had been describing his files in Russian. But the files were deleted by those who couldn't understand the descriptions, so he started putting English machine translations into the pages, instead of his Russian descriptions (to save time).

--AVRS (talk) 10:03, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

It'd be better with Wikinews (you don't really need to know the language to read news; though then English has little priority, except that there are many versions, and the English one is probably one of the most active ones) or Wikibooks (in those cases where there are too few good wikibooks so only the English ones are detailed). But how likely are people to prefer to go to a library with English translations of Italian works? English is lingua franca, and some projects' English versions (like Wikibooks, but that is only compared to the Russian and Esperanto versions, on a couple of subjects; of Wikinews I can only say that readers could prefer the English one because there are many versions which are probably much less active) may be better, but that doesn't mean people would prefer reading long texts (Wikisource) in English (except for laws, which are not really there). No, I don't think English is the second preferred option for real texts, unless you want to read a few short UN resolutions and modern political speeches (marked as copyvios). --AVRS (talk) 10:15, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, in the case of news, it is possible that the amount of coverage of a country in Wikinews would be the greatest in its native language first, then English, and then after that other languages. There may be articles available in languages not in the native language and not English, but there may not be as many.

For historical texts, there may be public domain translations made by other people/notable people in history (i.e. 16th century translations) and not texts that are translated by other Wikipedians - Some people may be interested to see how the historical texts were adapted in English - Also some governments may issue official translations of bills and laws in English (I'm not sure where they would be)

I have also offered to have translation requests posted for individual users' licensing templates. User:Raboe001/licence already had some translations in European languages, but I posted translation requests, and other Wikipedians added text in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese -- also there is an Arabic translation in progress

WhisperToMe (talk) 22:27, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

News coverage: it is likely to be as great in languages to which it is easy to translate from the other ones. E.g. machine translation from Ukrainian into Russian is pretty good, so translation from Russian to Ukrainian would also be good, but aren't going to make links to all the languages of Russia's bordering countries bold? The only really useful marking of irrelevant language would be, IMO, something like letter sections in a dictionary. But since you can't bold English and not the relevant language, it doesn't make a lot of sense to use bolding for that. --AVRS (talk) 10:54, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Historical texts are translated into all major languages. Those who are interested in how they were adapted to English are just "some people". --AVRS (talk) 10:54, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, in cases of such countries it would make sense. Not for every country. --AVRS (talk) 10:54, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Translation requests: the need to translate so much and the amount of untranslated stuff shows how "good" lingua franca English is. :( You are lucky to have most stuff in your native language, and I am lucky to be able to understand it, but note that some corporations producing home appliances and computers don't seem to bother translating their instruction manuals properly, while they still do provide them in tens of languages. Maybe this does not harm those who use hieroglyphs in their native language much… Why can't a lingua franca have a somewhat regular orthography? Maybe even Shavian alphabet would be better. And you want people to find English texts easier than their native language ones. It should be a script to highlight the language preferred by the browser, or maybe thin lines showing what side of the alphabet it is (e.g. if there are no codes before "n", show 3 vertical lines before the code list). --AVRS (talk) 10:54, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Maybe an argument for having "en" there bolded is that links to Wikisource are not for those looking for related texts, but just for those looking for related categories? It would then be better to have a special common page for interwiki links of those pages then (with nothing highlighted), to which there would be a single link from Commons. --AVRS (talk) 10:15, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

In regards for categories, that is a good explanation too - The English Wikisource may have more diverse and detailed categories than other Wikisource versions. WhisperToMe (talk) 22:29, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Then do not bold until it does (though in that case it had better categories than some of the other pages; but not necessarily better subcategories). --AVRS (talk) 10:54, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Related pages in Bugzilla: “Central database for interwiki” (with links to two other bugs), “Highlight interwiki for the language of homewiki of a user which has a global account”, “interwiki "links to" / whatlinkshere”. --AVRS (talk) 11:29, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

When I click "bug:" it takes me to a foreign language Wikipedia. WhisperToMe (talk) 17:22, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, it should be “bugzilla:”. Fixed. --AVRS (talk) 19:38, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

There is another English-preference problem, which may or may not affect search engines' results as much as highlighting: all the links in these tables are to redirects through the English version of the page. --AVRS (talk) 10:15, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

A simpler solution (if possible for non-logged users): have a script highlight the user's preferred language. --AVRS (talk) 10:15, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Also note that Wikipedia does not highlight English or related-language interwiki links even if there are tens of links. It uses a different order sometimes though. --AVRS (talk) 10:15, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

By the way, an interesting table (Commons users by native language, Wikipedia language section users with that native language, files uploaded). --AVRS (talk) 10:18, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

It is interesting - It shows how many speak European languages and Japanese

WhisperToMe (talk) 04:09, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

I think only the links to English categories on Wikipedia need to be highlighted, because that helps the reader understand what the category name means in English, to categorize files accordingly also to the English name. E.g. Wikinews needs only to link to Commons, but Commons has no reason to prefer English Wikinews. --AVRS (talk) 07:29, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

IMO, a good solution for those other cases would be to just have good interwiki links from the relevant-language categories. Else it's like recommending or requiring that file names be in English (rejected, no technical reason good enough). --AVRS (talk) 07:41, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Well the idea is that the bolding affects English and the relevant local languages. Not every language of every topic can be given priority. Because English is widely spoken, it gets priority. But this isn't English only, so in addition the "local languages" (depending on the subject) should also be bolded. So in response to "Commons has no reason to prefer English Wikinews" - It has a reason, because English is the most likely to be understood. If Joe doesn't know Italian, the language that he/she is most likely to know is English.

I agree that we don't need all filenames to be in English. Categories are there to help people find the files. So too are the text descriptions. Because we have categories and text descriptions, we don't need the actual filenames to be in English.

WhisperToMe (talk) 07:17, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks

Someone, or a group of people, is doing a fantastic job keeping this category organized and uncluttered. I can only imagine how bad it would have gotten without guardian angels. example: category:books, with over 1000 unclassified images. this would surely have at least 3,000 if no one was watching. very inspiring.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 06:43, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

from morocco

Hello, How are u? Wahbi111 (talk) 01:17, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Diffusing the category

How many people here are actively trying to diffuse this category besides me? I've seen obviously specific images, poorly named images, and incorrectly named images, but whatever the case may be, I've been replacing the category with specific locations as quickly as possible. ----DanTD (talk) 03:21, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Amerikanischer Photograph

Many of the German pictures titled "Amerikanischer Photograph" appear to be of various locations in New York City, Does anybody from WikiProject:New York City wish to sort those out? ----DanTD (talk) 13:31, 26 August 2018 (UTC)