522274 - Allow multiple articles to have the same title

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(support.mozilla.org :: Knowledge Base Software, task)

Description

[[:Cww]]

Articles in different languages can't have the same title so when you translate Firefox, you have to append -fr to get it to accept the title.  This has led to more than few articles with (space)title and title(space)(space) etc to work around it... ditto for languages like uk and ru where translations of short sentences can be the same etc.

We should allow two translations of the same article have the same title and different data.

This will be a MAJOR DB shuffle since a lot of JOINs are on pageName or page title or pollname and these which will have to be rewritten to join on pageName and language.

Comment 1

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

I'm not sure this is the right solution. What localizers should be doing is translating the title. We're trying to address this in <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Support/Simplifying_article_translation:PRD>.

Comment 2

[[:Cww]]

The point is they can't.  How do you translate "Thunderbird"?

And what if Firefox Help translates the same in two languages (like to Aide Firefox in both French and Italian?)

Comment 3

[David Tenser [:djst]]

Which articles are affected by this today? I have previously been of the same opinion that we should support the same article name for different articles, but in 99% of the cases, the real solution is to use better article titles.

If it's just "Thunderbird" can we figure out a better article name that is more verbose, e.g. "Where to find Thunderbird Support" or similar?

Note: the really neat solution for the future would be to support identical titles and automatically generate unique URLs in the same way that Wordpress does it today (i.e. that it auto-suggests a URL that you can even edit to your liking).

Comment 4

[Paul Craciunoiu [:paulc]]

FTR, I filed a similar bug a while back: bug 466079

Comment 5

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Could you provide more detail on how we are going to deal with other aspects of working with articles?
* theme assignments
* attaching articles to translation tables
* article comments
* internal links
* review notifications

The Thunderbird article should probably be renamed to something more specific like "Need help with Thunderbird" or put in the form of a question.

We already have fr and it versions of "Firefox Help".

Comment 6

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

Cheng, can you give us the number of articles actually affected by this? How many used the spaces workaround or have a locale appended to the title?

Comment 7

[[:Cww]]

34 sets articles are different from another article in a different language simply on spaces.  I can't easily search for "have locale appended".

Comment 8

[David Tenser [:djst]]

As for article name problem itself, we could easily fix that by being clearer about article naming policies for localizers and make sure we avoid short/generic article names.

Removing priority of this bug for now. We should establish priorities for this milestone based on input from localizers. Leaving it in 1.6 to keep it on the radar.

Cheng: as I understand from our chat on IM, the main reason why this bug is bad for us is because of the way the new search indexer treats articles with spaces as duplicates. My gut feeling is that it might be simpler to fix the indexer, although the easiest thing is probably to fix our article naming policy.

Comment 9

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Cheng: as I understand from our chat on IM, the main reason why this bug is bad
> for us is because of the way the new search indexer treats articles with spaces
> as duplicates. My gut feeling is that it might be simpler to fix the indexer,
> although the easiest thing is probably to fix our article naming policy.

Telling the indexer that spaces are significant--if it's even possible--is definitely the wrong way to go about solving this.

Of course, using pageName as a foreign key is also "doing it wrong." I definitely wouldn't mind using the ID as a foreign key and making locale-pageName into a unique key, but we'd need a better estimate of the work needed to accomplish that.

Comment 10

[Scoobidiver (away)]

I think it is fixed now.

Comment 11

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

Fixed in Kitsune.