User:Donald Trung/Categories should be multilingual and redirects should be functional/Multilingual category redirects

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This is an essay about how Wikimedia Commons could become more friendly to our non-Anglophone colleagues by allowing categories to be displayed in their language.

Categories should not only be in English

Despite the language being selected as "Mandarin Chinese" and both the Wikidata item and the category itself containing Taiwanese alternatives the title of the category is still displayed in the English language.

Sometimes I wonder into Wikimedia Commons from a non-English language Wikimedia project such as the Mandarin Chinese Wikipedia or the Vietnamese Wikipedia, however rather than finding the titles appropriate for the language I Wikimedia Commons displays in, it still shows the English language titles such as “Category:Round coins of the State of Qi” even though I’ve added the Taiwanese title “齊國圜錢” which is also used at the Mandarin Chinese Wikipedia. It would make sense for people who can’t speak and understand English to still be able to navigate their way through Wikimedia Commons, right? This could easily be implemented by just changing the display titles of the categories, non-English titles would redirect to their English equivalents but would display themselves in whichever language the viewer has set their preferences to.

Additionally translations could be imported from Wikidata, Wikidata often features non-English translations of its items so a bot could simply mass-create redirects that will serve as alternative display titles based on these. In case these alternative titles change on Wikidata they should change on Wikimedia Commons, but I think that the software should be able to prefer Wikipedia article titles over translations but should be able to be manually overwritten locally will like a special template like {{Preferred translation}}. An example of using a more Wikipedia-centric translation method would be using Category:Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki which exists as the English Wikipedia article “w:en:Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki” and as the Greek Wikipedia article “w:el:Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο Θεσσαλονίκης”, then the alternative title for the Wikimedia Commons category for users coming in from that language could be “Category:Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο Θεσσαλονίκης” or “Κατηγορία:Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο Θεσσαλονίκης” (namespace changes could be handled outside the redirects and just automatically display the translations in the preferred language).

Notes 📝 (outside of the proposal)

• Generally speaking 🗣 I doubt that the Anglocentric nature of Wikimedia Commons will change unless a push by non-English speakers will force it to, as policy and guideline proposals and any requests for comment on Wikimedia Commons are almost exclusively in English non-English speakers both literally and figuratively don't have a voice in the conversations that concern them (basically they suffer from the same underrepresentation as the readers do), non-English speakers can’t learn of this proposal or even vote ❎ on it simply because they can’t understand it.

• Not everyone is that well versed in English, even those that do speak it to some extend, allowing them to use Wikimedia Commons in their own language will probably allow a greater participation.

• As Wikidata could be the best tool 🔬 to try to accomplish this I might try to add this proposal to Commons:Structured data as it would help structure the non-English language data more closely with the English equivalents.

Original publication 📤

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 16:49, 11 October 2018 (UTC)