Request for a new language: Obolo (Andoni) [[[Portal:Ann|ann]]]

Can someone help look into this issue: Category:Translatewiki.net/ann. I've been checking on it but it's not been enabled since then. It still shows "disabled".

CC: @Amir E. Aharoni and @Verdi p

Thanks

Katelem (talk)14:09, 19 July 2020

As I already said above, this page is locked since its initial creation because of a bug. It cannot be edited to remove the notice.

Only a site admin may be able to fix it using an admin tool (It was said they should edit the page using the "ReplaceText" extension, which forced changeing the page content, but requires making an actual change). I cannot test if this solution works (various people on other wikis have said that even this solution was not always removing this lock; and the "ReplaceText" extension is dangerous; it's not accessible on this wiki except by site admins themselves)

This is a known bug of SemanticMetaWiki (which sets an incorrect status on the page without creating the necessary job in the job queue to remove this status once the job has run), signaled since long, not solved.

I cannot do anything.

This is occuring in some other category pages as well (each time when adding/removing a category); and it occurs randomly in an unpredictable way (even on a new page created once and never edited later, this lock may remain). SemanticMediWiki (not Mediawiki) is the cause of this bug.

Verdy p (talk)15:05, 2 August 2020

Thank you for taking the time to explain. I believe the admin will be working on it. I have noticed that Obolo and Andoni is used simultaneously on the page. I'm just wondering if that may not have contributed to the bug. How about using just "Obolo" (preferred, denonym) or just "Andoni" (alternate, exonym) for uniformity.

Katelem (talk)14:22, 17 August 2020

The page displays first the language name translated in the current user language, then the language name in itself ("autonym"), if it's different. The autonym comes from the name currently displayed in the linked English Wikipedia article (may be it's one of the aliases for this autonym).

There's no distinction between denonym or exonym. Names in English normally come from Glottolog. Other names are translations (possibly found in Wikidata from the linked Wikipedia article: this article is checked to make sure it refers precisely to this language and not just to a group of related languages as it happens sometimes, so Wikidata is also checked to see if it refers to the expected ISO 639 code with the correct distinction).Translations are user contributed in Wikidata, or are fed from the CLDR data veting process (where it exists, it is used as the preferred name, but I also check at list of references in Glottolog and The Linguist List; sometimes these sources do not agree as there are collections of papers written at different dates by linguists publishing from different countries and in different languages; there are also frequent difference of orthographies for the same target translation language). So I cannot conclude if "Andoni" is or is no the preferred "autonym", all I can say is that the preferred English name is "Obolo", and that "Andoni" is also frequently found and used; both are then displayed in the English portal here (not just the supposed "autonym").

It is then categorized in a category which is named according to the current name in English (the preferred one displayed in Glottolog). In the page of languages by family name, there's a long list of languages with known aliases (also listed in Glottolog): some of the aliases are in fat for local dialects; when these dislects are recognized they are listed separately as subitems in that list, otherwise they are treated as aliases). I don't know what is a "denonym", you probably mean "endonym" (by opposition to "exonym"), or "demonym"/"ethnonym", which is a related but different concept related to people (in ethnology) and not the language(s) they speak (they can speak several one, including in forms of diglossia depending with whom they are speaking, or in some context like in cultural/religious/formal events if there are other auditors or if they want to be understood by more people). For the case that it shows "disabled", this is signlaed to admins here since weeks. This is also signaled as a bug to authors of "SemanticMetaWiki" that don't propose any solution (and have refused to develop a script to fix the database with a support script that site admins could use). They only propose something that may solve this incorrect lock (but requires using a dangerous tool that is only available to site admins). They've not isolated the bug that can occur at any time.

This bug is there in SemanticMediawiki since years, commented many times. Closed several times incorrectly as being "unreproductible" (even if it is easily found and it continues to be reported by site admins of multiple wikis, not just this one. This leaves the question: is SemanticMediawiki a reasonable extension to keep on this wiki ? My opinion is that it just breaks this wiki that does not even have any productful use of SemanticMediawiki. It could live without it, replacing it with Wikibase or a client interface to Wikidata to manage some custom properties or perform structured queries on an RDF database. For now SmenaticMediawiki just breaks the basic feature of Mediawiki and it behaves badly. It's causing more harm for no benefit at all.

Verdy p (talk)03:47, 18 August 2020