This proposal forces us to revisit some core Wagn principles around name handling.

 

Name Uniqueness

 

For example, it’s always been the case that, in Wagn, you can’t have two cards of the same name.  With this proposal, a name no longer has to be unique within a deck, it just has to be unique for a given language within a deck.  So, as often happens, the same word can mean different things in different languages (false cognates).

 

Compound Names

 

Also, we’ve also long held this principle:

 

If there is A+B, there must be an A and a B.

 

Translating that into a multilingual environment looks like this:

 

For A+B in language Xese, we must have A in Xese and B in Xese.

 

The rest of this section reviews the translation patterns from a cardname perspective (ie, the consequences of *card translation rules).

Universal and Monolingual

 

In the context of the A+B discussion above, if A is universal, it exists in all languages, but if A is monolingual it only exists in one.

Examples

 

User cards will have Universal names.   Assuming that they're structured cards (as they are on Wikirate), this only really means that Users shouldn't have different names in different languages.  This may be counter-intuitive, because clearly “Richard Mills” is not a Spanish name, but by making user names universal, we’re saying it’s valid to say “Richard Mills es muy guapo”.  In other words, you can use this name even in a Spanish context.

 

I would expect that Company names will probably be treated as universal by default, but there are clearly cases where they have different names in different languages, so we may needs some special handling for this, too.

 

Strict

 

Strict names follow strict content patterns very closely.  If one name is translated from another, than a "rename" risks leaving related names mistranslated and must be addressed.  But, since name and content are different, these may need some separate handling.

 

 

Examples

Claims: the "main claim" (the 100-character-or-fewer statement) is stored as a card name.  A claim clearly follows the Strict pattern as described in the content section. Given that they acquire votes, it's important that two versions of the same claim in two languages *actually* be making the same claim.  A significant mistranslation could really screw up the voting.  It's also important that they follow the naming pattern described above: a claim's value can be measured in part by how often it's cited, and we want to be able to measure this across languages.

 

Topic names and Tag names are also obvious candidates for translated names.  The Translatable examples in the content section above (legal, policy), will also tend to follow this naming pattern.  In fact, translated names could likely be the default.

Free

 

To recap, "Free" cards are a group of cards that are NOT necessarily strict translations of each other but which fit into the same context on the site in different languages.

 

In the case of compound cards (plus cards), we can create an A+B for every language that handles both A and B.