Help:Contributing/languages

The knowledge base is multilingual by design: every item and property can carry labels, descriptions and aliases in many languages, and wiki pages can be marked for translation. This page explains how the two mechanisms work and the house rules around them.

Labels, descriptions and aliases (entity terms)

Items and properties are single entities: there is exactly one page per entity (for example Special:EntityPage/Q1), shown in the reader's interface language. The multilingual content lives inside the entity as per-language values.

Field	What it is	Example (item Q1)
Label	The short, human-readable name of the entity	Instance of
Description	A one-line clarification that disambiguates the entity	that class of which this subject is a particular example and member
Aliases	Alternative names or spellings that also resolve to the entity	is a; belongs to class

To add or edit terms in another language, open the entity in edit mode and use the "In more languages" section at the top of the page. Every field takes a language code (for example en, fr, de, eo) and the value for that language.

House rules for entity terms

• A label and a description must be unique together per language: no two entities may share the same label + description pair in the same language.
• Do not copy Wikidata property numbers — properties are mirrored and mapped via equivalence statements instead (see the ontology alignment decision).
• Prefer the local, human-written value over a machine translation; if you use a machine translation, review it against the original before saving.

Translating wiki pages

Wiki pages (help pages, documentation, the main page) are translated with the Translate extension. A translation administrator marks a page for translation; translators then work through the translation interface.

• Special:Translate — the translation interface, listing untranslated units per page.
• Translated pages are served in the reader's interface language automatically; you can force a language with ?uselang=fr.
• Translation units are the <translate> blocks in the source wikitext — keep them self-contained, one sentence or short paragraph each.

House rules for translated pages

• Machine translation is a starting point, not a final answer: always read and correct machine-translated units.
• Keep terminology consistent with the entity terms (labels/descriptions) used in the data layer.
• Do not translate tvar placeholders or markup — translate only the human-readable text.

See also

• Help:Contributing — contributing to this wiki
• Help:Contributing/code — code blocks and syntax highlighting
• Translate extension help (official)