Template talk:French criminal law

Purpose and scope
This template is intended to group topics related to French criminal law, both to provide a handy, one-stop shop to find and browse related articles, as well as to provide a starting point for editors who wish to monitor and expand English Wikipedia's coverage about currently missing topics in French criminal law. Not surprisingly, the coverage at French Wikipedia is much broader and deeper, and the hope is that the numerous red links present at the outset will spur volunteers to tackle these topics, and to enrich the project by adding articles about them at English Wikipedia.

Any red link added here, should, at a minimum, represent a topic that is notable enough to have an article on Wikipedia. In general, if a topic exists on French Wikipedia, that is probable evidence that it is notable. (Fr-wiki has its own policies on notability, but they are pretty similar to ours (fr:Wikipédia:Notoriété like our WP:N; Critères généraux de notoriété like our WP:GNG). Conversely, if a topic does not have an article on fr-wiki or en-wiki, it probably should not be linked here. (There may be some exceptions for topics red-linked at fr-wiki that are clearly notable, but that no French volunteer has gotten around to creating yet). That said, this is a template and not an article; so if you believe a topic is worth an article at en-wiki, but you are uncertain about notability, then go ahead and be bold and add it. Mathglot (talk) 20:58, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

Adding new entries: use interlanguage links with English titles
Adding new links to a nav template tied to a topic which has many more articles in a foreign language Wikipedia than in English is tricky. Many of the links will be red links, and that is appropriate; this quotation from the WP:RED LINK guideline is nominally about articles, but applies by extension to Nav templates as well: Add red links to articles to indicate that a page will be created soon or that an article should be created for the topic because the subject is notable and verifiable. Red links help Wikipedia grow. The creation of red links prevents new pages from being orphaned from the start. Good red links help Wikipedia—they encourage new contributors in useful directions, and remind us that Wikipedia is far from finished.

But a "completely red" link would neither help a user navigate to an article for more information, nor aid a volunteer editor to expand coverage by creating an article to cover the topic; therefore, all links added here that represent articles that do not exist yet in English Wikipedia should be added as Interlanguage links with a link to an existing French article, where more information about the topic can be found. Since the '[fr]' language code is a blue link, this satisfies these requirements. (Please do not add a "completely red" link to the Nav template; if you think there is a gap in coverage both in en-wiki and fr-wiki on some important topic, consider adding a discussion section here on the Talk page, or add a hidden comment about it to the Nav box.)

When you have a topic to add, create an entry using Template:Interlanguage link. Here's a copy/paste model: Where possible, use an expression in English for the title of the en-wiki article (param 1); consult WP:Article title policy and secondary sources in English to find the best title. (It doesn't have to be perfect; once the article is created from the red link, discussions at the article Talk page can determine the best title for it.) Param 2 is. Param 3 is the exact title of the article on French Wikipedia. Normally, the lt param should be present iwth a shorter version of the proposed English title; since the full English title will normally be qualified to satisfy WP:PRECISE, it might be something like: "Widgets in French criminal law" but it isn't helpful to see the long version repeated in a Nav template that is all about French criminal law, so that part should be dropped in the lt param value. In this case, you'd have something like: Finally there's the question of whether to use English or French words for the proposed new article title (param 1 of the interlanguage link) for a concept known in France but unfamiliar to most English readers. Mostly, this question is out-of-scope for this page, but see WP:Article title policy, check secondary sources, and check the titles of similar articles for guidance. As a general rule, English Wikipedia uses English titles wherever possible, except when English sources clearly use another language. (E.g., we wouldn't rename the Laissez-faire article on economic policy to Let-it-be economics, because *English sources* overwhelmingly use the French expression.) Many articles on French topics have English names: National Assembly (France), Chamber of Deputies (France), Eiffel Tower, and so on; we should follow that example. When in doubt, use English. If there's a dispute about naming, a template talk page is not the right place to resolve such questions; it can be settled later when the article is created. Mathglot (talk) 01:36, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Finding relevant articles with toolforge
Toolforge has a tool for finding articles in a given category that exist in lang-1, but not in lang-2. For example, here's a link to articles: in French category 'Droit pénal en France' but not in English. Mathglot (talk) 02:24, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

Bilingual glossaries, dictionaries, and search engines
Here are somebilingual glossaries, dictionaries and search engines to find and translate terms of French criminal law (or French law more generally) into English:

Mathglot (talk) 19:18, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Lexique français-anglais 124 pages; jurisource.ca
 * Lexique anglais-français 146 pages; jurisource.ca
 * Lexique Des Termes Juridiques Fr-En IBJ Criminal Defense Wiki
 * Glossary of English/French/Spanish Legal Terms 41 pages; Defense Wiki
 * List of law dictionaries
 * Subtilités des termes juridiques en français et en anglais
 * IATE European Union Terminology - search engine and translator
 * EU Vocabularies - search engine and translator
 * e-Justice
 * Justice of Canada - a few dozen links to dictionaries and glossaries
 * Dictionnaire du droit privé - browse or search, long, detailed articles on each term
 * Dictionnaires de droit prive McGill - browse/search, with definition, antonym, and translation
 * Lexiques et dictionnaires - dozens of links


 * Here are the top five sources I've been using for finding definitions of terms used in French criminal law. Note that three of these are bilingual (French headwords, English descriptions):
 * Council of Europe's Legal Dictionary (print book; about half the book viewable in Google books; bilingual)
 * Doucet's Dictionnaire de droit criminel (online; bilingual; free)
 * Elliott's "French Criminal Law" (print book; some pages viewable in Google books; bilingual)
 * The Justice.fr glossary (online; free; in French)
 * Ministre de la Justice key words glossary (online; free; monolingual)
 * Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 11:11, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Several more:
 * Cairns, MKeon (1995), glossary
 * CNRTL dictionary
 * Hodgson (2005), glossary
 * Also, the A–Z topic overviews at Dalloz.

Mathglot (talk) 05:48, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Some candidate links
These are some articles to be considered for inclusion: Crime in France, Law enforcement in France, and French judiciary courts. They are not included now, because they are in poor condition, typically vastly under-sourced, and they look like translations from under-sourced or unsourced article in French Wikipedia, which have laxer standards typically than en-wiki does. But they should be kept in mind for inclusion, if they can be improved. Mathglot (talk) 10:23, 24 January 2023 (UTC)


 * https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000000381337 Elinruby (talk) 04:17, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * That's the law of 30 Dec. 1996 on the Air and the Rational Use of Energy, all of it revoked, except for titles 5, 6, and 10. What's the relevance here? Mathglot (talk) 05:47, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Two templates or one?
There are still too many red links in this template to consider a split, but in the future, as articles are created and links turn blue, there is another approach that could be taken that would divide the template roughly in two. At French Wikipedia, they have fr:Modèle:Palette Droit pénal français (French criminal law template) as well as fr:Modèle:Palette Procédure pénale en France (French criminal procedure template); that approach might be a model going forward, after most of the red links here are resolved. Mathglot (talk) 00:26, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Mining French nav templates
More content can be found at French nav templates fr:Modèle:Palette Procédure pénale en France, fr:Modèle:Palette Carrières judiciaires en France, fr:Modèle:Palette Organisation juridictionnelle en France (bas), fr:Modèle:Palette Droit français. Mathglot (talk) 16:56, 5 July 2023 (UTC)