Tutorial:Redirects non-English pages
This tutorial describes how redirect pages, which in English are straightforward and simple, run into problems for other languages and how a workaround solution can be achieved.
Problem: display in category pages
Redirecting is avoided in the main namespace in order to maintain a simple structure of articles, but it is used quite often in the glossary to manage abreviations (e.g. EU => European Union (EU)), synonyms (e.g. workforce => labour force) and auxiliary concepts explained in an item with another name (e.g. gestation => birth).
In English this is quite simple: the URL is also the level-1 heading displayed as the title of the page, and this same title is also displayed properly in the category pages; both in the Main namespace (for articles) where page name is shown as in the other namespaces (preceded by 'Glossary:', 'Tutorial:' etc.) where the item is shown in the list without this preceding namespace: glossary items, for instance, are displayed without the namespace 'Glossary:' in front.
For other-language pages, however, there is one essential difference: the url is not the same as the level-1 heading (page name) which has to be inserted manually on top of the page as an other-language level-1 heading between '=' (e.g. '=Europäische Union (EU)=' on top of the German 'European Union (EU)/de' glossary page). As a result, the page name is displayed and alphabetically ordered as 'English url/language code' instead of as 'pagename in the other language': for instance as 'European Union (UE)/fr' instead of 'Union européenne (UE)' - this of course makes the non-English glossary category pages totally useless as an alphabetical listing of glossary items in that other language.
Solution
We need two pages to do the work achieved by one single redirect page in English:
- redirecting: other-language version of English redirect page, e.g. Glossary:EU/fr; this page is just used for linking from an article to the corresponding content page, it should not have any category assignment;
- being properly displayed in category pages: a regular 'pseudo-English' page (without '/language code'), with exactly the same name as the other-language title of the redirect item (e.g. Glossaire:UE, preceded by 'Glossaire' etc. so as to separate it from regular Main namespace English page) but to be displayed in a glossary at the right alphabetical position without the 'namespace' 'Glossaire'.
- Note
- In this second group we will have a new problem with exact synonym names, if:
- the word for 'glossary' is identical in two languages;
- and the term in the glossary is identical as well (for instance 'UE');
- because it is impossible to have two items in Statistics Explained with exactly the same name.
- At this moment, fortunately, all other-language glossary namespaces are still unique, namely:
- Glosario (es);
- Glossaire (fr);
- Glossar (de)
- Glossarium (nl)
- Orðalisti (is);
- Ordlista (sv)
- Słownik (pl)
- sõnastik (et);
- Γλωσσάριo (el).