Community Wishlist/Wishes/Improve Scrap the ((Language)) format that links with Wiktionary/en
Description
In Wikipedia articles and Wiktionary there is a (newish) template function that attributes words to specific living and dead languages. Nice idea in principle particularly for showing how words develop using their etymologies.
BUT!
It doesn't work as instead of going to the exact right place on the Wiktionary page it just generally lands on the entire page. What is even worse in my opinion is that the link from the origin page shows as Blue - meaning it connects to the right place - instead of Red - meaning either the entire page is missing, or the correct specific entry for that etymology or meaning of that word.
It is thus giving WRONG information, and there is LOTS OF IT!!!
As a hobby I read a lot of historic Greek, Latin and English texts and constantly check etymologies and original meanings of words - day in, day out! - and the Wiktionary articles are particularly bad for English words, which is rather ironic given it is Wikipedia primary language. English has Old English, Middle English and (modern) English forms, and possibly even an Anglo-Saxon form, as well as many links to Old French and Latin and to the Proto-Germanic/PIE hypothetical original forms. Under the old method a link could be made directly to the language / specific meaning & etymology entry on a page for these various forms, which of course also often include other languages, and so if that form wasn't there then the link could be made to a non-existant place and thus show in Red on the origin page. This is helpful in several ways as it shows immediately that the link does not land on a page or place detailing this information correctly - this is useful for the searcher and useful for people like me happy to update or add pages. But now with this new Language-based link form, this no longer works, and the only time I see Red is when I click on the page and the correct information IS NOT THERE!!!
I will go as far as to say the (newish) system is RUBBISH and a FAILURE and needs a proper rethink or rejig or scrapping as I am not sure what it is even trying to achieve front end on the pages people want to look at. On top of that, it makes writing Wiktionary and Wikipedia articles harder, as it requires knowledge of this new template and all the shorthand terms for all the different languages - is Old English eno or oen? Is Middle English men or enm? Is there an Anglo-Saxon language setting - is that asen, aen, enas, ena? Where do I find this all out? Why should I even care when it DOESN'T PROPERLY WORK??? :D
Wikipedia and Wiktionary article-writing has become harder and harder for the Average Joes that have brought it this far and that in itself is WRONG as it is making Wikipedia the domain of some in-the-know elite (particularly true now with the new awful page layout that achieves nothing other than making writing articles harder and hides away useful information that used to be out on display), so this (newish) system is DOUBLE WRONG as it doesn't even work. Someone please fix it or bin it!
As for below, this is sort of both a "Bug report" and a "System change".
Thanks
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
System change
Related projects
All projects
Affected users
Article Readers and Writers and thus Wikis Wizards Behind the Curtain...