Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Echo/Archive 2005-2007

I recently realized that when I search for the average Dutch celebrity, the English Wikipedia has no information on him or her. Of course the Dutch one does, so in a couple of cases (e.g. Brainpower, Freek de Jonge, Sint Jansbrug) I started translating the available information. Since I believe this to be a useful idea, I figured a WikiProject would be useful to spread the word. Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 13:29, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

Featured articles in other languages
Perhaps we could compile a list of articles which are of featured quality in other languages but are not of the same standard here. violet/riga (t) 14:01, 23 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Something to be aware of is that other Wikipedias sometimes have different standards of quality to the English-language 'pedia, but that said I think this is an excellent idea. The easiest way to get a convenient list out of another Wikipedia of it's featured articles is probably to do 'what links here' on that language's featured article template: for the Spanish 'pedia, the list is at es:Especial:Whatlinkshere/Plantilla:Art%C3%ADculodestacado --Ngb 14:45, 23 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Or just look at their equivalents of Featured articles by looking at the interwikis. You do make a good point of the differing standards - I noticed one that I know wouldn't be of featured standard on the English site, but it was still five times the length.  violet/riga (t) 14:48, 23 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Starting at featured articles is an excellent idea. Of course they're still subject to our WP:FAC process :) Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 15:32, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

Please take a look at Featured articles in other languages (WP:FAOL). violet/riga (t) 17:31, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

WP:TIE
How is this project meant to tie into Translation into English (or isn't it!)? There are selections of French and German featured articles there waiting for willing translators. Physchim62 16:00, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
 * There's an obvious overlap. I believe the difference is that on TIE people can request articles to be translated, while on ECHO people go search for featured articles on other Wikis. Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 16:54, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
 * Please, though, if you come across good articles in your foraging that don't have English-language equivalents, list them on WP:TIE. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:34, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

Don't do this mechanically or this project is pointless
I was a bit wary of this project to begin with, and after some events today, I can see my worries were confirmed.

Today, someone added an echo tag to Talk:World War II saying that Arabic has a feautured article on it. Giving the arabic article a brief glimpse, you can tell it's a tiny, tiny fraction the size of World War II.

Just mechanically tagging articles is stupid, because (generally speaking) featured articles in most other languages (german being the exception, IMO) tend to be *very far below* what we would consider a required for a featured article in english.

So you've now added a tag encouraging people to bring in information to our World War II article from an arabic article that's 1/10th the size. What's the point? What an awful idea. Don't mechanically apply it, because this kind of thing becomes more common if you do. &rarr;Raul654 17:35, July 28, 2005 (UTC)


 * Just because the article is smaller doesn't mean there isn't potentially useful information that could be brought across. Identification of this sort of thing is an important step in rectifying Wikipedia's horrendous problem of systemic bias. --Ngb 18:03, 28 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I think Raul has a good point... a FAOL tag should only be applied if the other-language version is better than the English one. If you can't read it, you shouldn't be adding it in. Actually, come to think of it, if you can read it, it may be a lot easier to improve the English article yourself - sticking up a FAOL is kind of like asking other people to do the work. Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 17:05, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
 * Amen! &rarr;Raul654 17:07, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
 * I disagree there. I can't read it, but when there is a massive amount of text on the foreign article and just a few lines on the English one I think it's pretty obvious. I understand the point of only having it on articles that need translating though, hence the request to discuss things before we go too far into detail. Note also that I've created FAOLdone. violet/riga (t) 17:30, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
 * I wasn't arguing that -- I was questioning his assumption that because the article was shorter it therefore had nothing of value in it. Although I do agree that a FAOL tag should be added only if the adder believes the other article contains something of value, I don't think it should be viewed as a poor substitute for improving the article yourself. Several of the tags that can be added to articles (context, cleanup, etc.) are essentially 'asking other people to do the work'. --Ngb 17:38, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
 * I think that this idea is really good. Even if they other FA is small, it may prove useful as it may give ideas as to format, stuff that is missing in the English version and may give a lot of other source information to others to use to better the english form. Just because it's small doesn't mean it isn't any good. --Bob 00:07, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

New tool
With thanks to Gmaxwell, I put in a new scheme into monobook.js. This will allow us to use, link FA, which will put a star next to FA's. See Bassoon and Hugo Chavez for an example on how this works. Zach (Sound Off) 07:59, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Based on size
Like most comments I'm suggesting other people do more work but as I was reading this page I had an idea with no personal idea of how to accomplish it. We can automatically tag articles that either don't exist in english or that are significantly larger in a different language then in english. Although this doesn't help us with curing bias in american articles, the bias is not very strong (IMO) and is less of a priority then adding content. As for what constitutes significantly larger, it should a function of size and percentage; must be five times larger then tiny articles but only 50% larger than huge articles. If there's a way to implement an equation I'll happily make one. Vicarious 02:06, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
 * This isn't so hard. Check Special:Longpages in each language, and start with the first page of results; usually there is more info there than in English. +sj + 02:01, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

what to do bout languages you don't speak?
My wathclist tells me that the russian wikipedia's article on the number 12 is a featured article and htat perhaps I could use it to improve the english article on the topic. No offense, but russian is all greek to me! I thouhgt maybe I could use wikibedia babel to find a russian speaking user who might be able to help, but then I thought maybe their's a more systematic way to go about this. Numerao 15:43, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Article Improvement Drive
Architecture of Africa is currently nominated on Article Improvement Drive. Come to this page and support it with your vote. Help us improve this article to featured status.--Fenice 08:47, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Category and article coupling
A particular interest of mine is interlinking equivalent categories and articles - the former are an excellent way of seeing what articles are missing (eg compare Category:Skyscrapers in Frankfurt with de:Kategorie:Hohes Gebäude (Frankfurt am Main)). An added bonus is that it is often possible to find entire groups of languages where an inter-language link is missing, because some languages are linked to by (say) German wikipedia but not by the English one. I have two queries here, though. (1) Do all wikipedias use the same convention for ordering interlang links? I rememer there being some controversy about this in the past. (2) Is there somebody with a bot who updates interlanguage links in the manner I described (i.e. following all the possible interlang links on en. and then following any new links that this throws up, and so on until all of the articles have been found, then putting in the complete list into all the languages?)? I know there was an incident where such a bot actually deleted some links and was then stopped. I don't know whether anyone followed this up with a more successful one! TheGrappler 16:11, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

New Article
Although not a featured article, it is a large one and the only one in Danish I can find which is worth doing. I started the translation. Copenhagen_Fire_of_1728. I would like to know if I can put the echo banner up on it. I have two and a half more days (the timeline of the article) to translate. Is there anyone else here who speaks Danish? If not, can you guys help me improve the english version by proof reading it? Thanks. --OrbitOne 22:41, 19 February 2006 (UTC)


 * My Danish is limited but I do possess a very good Dansk-Engelsk dictionary! Also I can proof read. Could you give me the article title for your new translation? TheGrappler 14:16, 20 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Whoops. Wrong year. :p


 * There is also one other article wich is a featured article in norwiegen (Norsk) which I just translated a majority part into english from danish. Ludvig_Holberg --OrbitOne 14:31, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Echo has identified
"The WikiProject Echo has identified that 1948 Arab-Israeli War is a foreign language featured article. You may be able to improve this article with information from the Hebrew language Wikipedia."

Where was this decided?24.64.166.191 04:56, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Problems/confusion
Someone recently posted one of these messages on the Talk:Kimono page. Now, the Kimono article is obviously about a Japanese topic, yet the message says that the article might be improved by looking at the Arabic Wikipedia. This is clearly weird.

I've been discussing it with the person who posted it, but several other users apparently have just reverted the addition finding it, as I do, weird.

It seems to me that it's much more intuitive to post links to the relevant article in the original language (in this case, Japanese) when suggesting improvements.

If we're just saying that an article on another Wikipedia on the same topic has been featured, then that ought to be made very clear so as to avoid confusion. Also, if the idea is to let users know that there are more images available in the article on a different Wiki, then that should be made very clear, with information about the copyright status of those images (since not all Wikipedias have the same criteria for inclusion).

In this particular case, I would, if I could speak Arabic, challenge that article's status as a featured article, since it contains copyrighted images.

Exploding Boy 21:38, 27 February 2006 (UTC)


 * It isn't strange at all. Unless, of course, you think that Arabic speaking people will have no knowledge about Kimonos? Is that what you are trying to say? Sometimes, an article in a third language may provide more information on a topic than the relevant article in the original tongue. --Bob 22:12, 27 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, apparently it is strange. I'm certainly not saying that only Japanese speakers have knowledge about Japanese topics, but I certainly wouldn't look first, for example, to the Thai Wikipedia if I wanted information about hijab.  It is strange to direct readers to the Arabic- language article for better information on kimono.  Your message templates need clarification.  Exploding Boy 23:33, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

When and how does "Echo" status end?
A question: I have just enlarged an article (Francis II Rákóczi), basically translating it from the Hungarian wiki article on the same subject. Now what? Do I erase the Echo icon and reference? How do I let the wiki community know that the article is now at its normal length, not in a stub form any more? Gsandi 13:08, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I translate from Indonesian to English, and have translated several featured articles which now bear te WikiProject Echo template, and I also have the same question as Gsandi. Could I perhaps suggest that another template be created, reading something along the lines of: This article includes all the information contained in the equivelent article in the [language]wikipedia at [date]. However there may be additional information / sources in this article in the [language] wikipedia that has been added since." That also has the benefit of not leaving those of us to guess whether or not someone has been there before us and we can go onto something else! Please leave a message on my talk page when you guys have discussed the issue to tell me what I should be doing! Thanks.--Sepa 20:51, 20 April 2006 (UTC)


 * You could use the template FAOLdone to tell people when you translated the stuff over. --Bob 21:09, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Echo Userbox
Could someone please create an Echo userbox template? It would be nice to have one for Echo next to the others at Userboxes/WikiProjects, don't you think? Witty lama 07:14, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Hello, all
Just letting everybody know that I'm joining the Project. I am a native English speaker, but I speak Hebrew fluently. I have already begun working on putting stars next to links on en.Wikipedia pages to all FAs in he.Wikipedia before I first found WikiProject Echo. I hope to be of service. --DLand 02:09, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Carthage
crosslinked? We had an echo template pop up on Talk:Carthage, it points to a FA on the nl wiki - in fact it's the no wiki that's FA - wondering if thats someone's typo or a system glitch. No worries either way - just wanted to advise in case its a system thing - I can plagiarize effectively from both those langs ;-)Bridesmill 16:27, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Interlanguage link FA stars
I was wondering if anyone would be interested in running a bot to put the little stars in the "what links here" next to the FA'd links from other language 'pedias? I have asked here, Village pump (technical) and Bot requests and they just told me that I should go to Pywikipediabot. I don't know how to do these technical things but I reckon it needs to be done. It's very tedious going through the every FA'd article in other languages and putting the stars in manually. Please? Witty lama 00:37, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I'd like to use a bot to periodically identify FAs on other wikis and add the appropriate FAOL template to the proper talk page. It could probably do this as well, only I didn't know those stars were added manually. What's the procedure for putting up stars? Xaxafrad 06:07, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Helping with the Arabic/Hebrew Wikipedia
I know fluent Arabic and would gladly use this skill for Project Echo

--FinalWish

I can't join, but I'll help?
I don't think you guys want me as a participant, as EN is my only account and known language, but I do like to link up parallel information, so if I see FA stars in the foreign articles links and no FAOL tag in the talk page, I'll add it. I'll even recursively browse foreign listing of featured articles and check their statuses (stati?) on this wiki. So far, I'm still getting to the A's in DE. Xaxafrad 02:18, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

FAOL tag in other languages
So far, this tag only exists for 3 wikis (English, Simple English, and Swedish). How about German, French, etc versions? Xaxafrad 06:10, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
 * The French wiki template is found here.
 * Thanks for the tip, anony. ;) I'll add an interwiki link to the FAOL page. And while I'm thinking about it, doesn't anybody know if Project Echo exists in other languages? There's a link on the project page to a sister version in Chinese (I think). Maybe I'll have to follow links from the template pages to the project pages before updating our project page's interwiki links. Xaxafrad 05:15, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

Queen (band)
Queen (band) has a featured article in the Vietnamese laguage and I'm pretty sure its been directly translated from Queen (band).--172.163.233.18 21:39, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

How to ? (see below)
Echo looks like a nice project. However, I foud by random a tag like this " . It is there - Talk:Euphemism - and asks for improvement.

Few shall be able to learn from the featured Bulgarian article. What is the recommended method to gather help (said I to myself) : writing to - I'm back when I find the way (So speaketh me). So I came here and tried some links. What do we have :
 * "People of Bulgarian language" found in a list ?
 * Some "Request for translation" page ? Here, or in the Bg WP ?
 * "WP project Echo" hints ?
 * 1) A method. It is called "Structure" and lacks details ; my suggestions follow.
 * 2) Participants. No one seems to be fluent in Bulgarian.
 * 3) Some links. They may help to understand what we have at hand to use : the links available on this page (Echo Project) are -
 * Featured_articles_in_other_languages ; Euphemism is not listed.
 * The main page for translation, Translation_into_English which links to the two pages below -
 * The subpage Translation_into_English/Bulgarian ; it refers to a list of featured articles in the Bg WP. Cyrillinks and all.
 * The page Translators_available ; there are five people, happily one of them has a girlfriend.

A detailed method
My suggestions to build a process are based upon the precedent section's remarks and the existing method.

Find featured pages in foreign WPs Create or tag a similar page here in the English WP (target page), create language links ... Gather help - write to people if they consent for that - and define a space to store candidate translations Analyse those translations Merge the data in the target page and apply for a featured article status!
 * ... The process is quite clear. Just add this = update the "Featured_articles_in_other_languages" and the "Translation_into_English" pages, according to the source language
 * No problem.
 * The translation by itself cannot replace an existing article. There ought to be two things clearly defined : a place where people may enroll for a specific translation, and a space (user page, subpage of the target article or of the Echo project) for people to see the work in progress and the ideas
 * ... This means finding good ideas - the goal being to get featured - and changing the examples

If this method is OK, I'll update the related section. -- DLL .. T 21:36, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Project directory
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 13:36, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Page design
I did some major re-design for this project page. Can anyone take a look to see if it's alright? AQu01rius (User &#149; Talk) 04:15, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 18:42, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Please stop tagging articles from the Danish Wikipedia as FAs. That rank does not exist (yet).
Unfortunately, somebody must have misunderstood the star symbol used on the Danish Wikipedia. The Danish Wikipedia does use a star symbol (da:Skabelon:Udmærkelse) but this only means that the article has been showcased in one way or the other, e.g. by being selected as "article of the week" or similar. The Danish Wikipedia is considering the creation of an actual quality scale, but so far, only three types of articles exist: standard articles, stubs and - recently added - "Good Articles" for which the criteria is higher than on this Wikipedia. To quote from da:Wikipedia:Anbefalede artikler : "Please note that this does not make them featured articles [linking to the English Wikipedia]. The articles are still not "perfect" and can still be improved." This is also shown from the talk page of da:Diskussion:Skak (bottom) where an editor asks how this symbol was added to the Danish interwiki link and how to remove it correctly.

A rank corresponding to FA will probably one day be implemented but this issue remains under consideration, so please abstain from tagging Danish articles as "FA". Thanks for your understanding. Valentinian (talk) / (contribs) 00:46, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Dynamic positioning
I saw that Dynamic positioning was tagged with the Echo template asking to improve the article with information from the nl wikipedia. Since I wrote most of both articles, the information is more or less the same and the template can be removed. BoH 06:34, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Only three languages...?
It's sadly ironic that the page for a translation-related project like this only has versions in three languages...

63.231.134.100 21:15, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Improvement of which language?
I'd just like to comment that the process described improves the English Wiki, not a foreign one. It could easily be reversed, of course, but the goal says its specifically meant to improve the foreign wiki, and the process describes improvement of the English wiki.

In the end, I think that the project should be improving both; I'm just saying there's some incongruity on the main page. Atropos 23:51, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Banner templates
I've designed replacements for FAOL and FAOLdone, currently at and. Both should be 100% backwards compatible with the old versions. Please comment at Wikipedia talk:Featured articles in other languages to keep the discussion in one place. Anomie 03:08, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Translation
This may not be the place for my question, but here goes. I noticed the translation tag on the Edwin Müller and have done a decent copyedit to remove the grammatical issues I saw that remained from the translation, and I think it is time to remove the tag from the article. While there are instructions in the tag, there are none on when to remove the tag. Can someone inform me on this issue. I think the article can stand on its own now. TIA. ww2censor 21:02, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

LF template to post on talk page to suggest getting info from foreign language
I thought a template existed suggesting people translate information from a particular foreign language page to improve the english version. Does one exist? Tkjazzer 03:51, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Purpose of the Project
I always thought English wikipedia articles are always better than the other ones, specially featured ones. Am I right?-- Andersmusician  VOTE  18:10, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No. Standards for featured articles are usually higher, but for any given topic, another language Wikipedia could well have a superior article. Using information from a foreign-language featured article to bring an English-language one up to Featured may not be possible, but in many cases they can be vastly improved. That is the point of the project, as far as I can tell. Rigadoun (talk) 21:55, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * yeah I now see that certain topics might be more important and even more referenced in other language wikis. good point-- Andersmusician  VOTE  01:53, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

There appears to be an error on the project page concerning Interwiki links
Which reads:

''1 Project organisation ...

''The process is as follows ...

''Edit that page to add a interwiki link PAGETITLE, thus linking it to the English Wikipedia. Create that page on the English Wikipedia, linking it back with a similar tag....

I belive this should read:

''Edit that page to add a interwiki link en:PAGETITLE, thus linking it to the English Wikipedia. ''Create that page on the English Wikipedia, linking it back with a similar tag.... ''

NB There should be colons both before and after the language code, both for English and for the foreign language!

There was apparently at some time a change in Interwiki markups; see the paragraph ending '' ... and de:InterWiki (former syntax: DeWikipedia:InterWiki) appears as de:InterWiki. ''

I'm a newcomer to these parts and loathe to mess around with the project page without having heard from the oldtimers.

Robert Greer 02:32, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

No, that isn't right.
The added colon will make the link appear inline, which is sometimes useful (for example, in text like see the German article on X); but in order to link the article using the interwiki links that appear on the left side of the screen ("in other languages"), you shouldn't use the colon, and they will be automatically inserted there. It's explained at Help:Interlanguage links. Rigadoun (talk) 21:44, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you
Now I understand (I hope.) That's the reason I asked the old timers. Robert Greer 16:29, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Translated and updated Version of BDSM online
After it was requested on the article's talk several times and for over a year the translation of the featured :de (German) article was finished today.

The latest version includes the featured German article and the missing information from the former :en article.--Nemissimo (talk) 08:59, 19 November 2007 (UTC)