I was recently reading a Wikipedia article about a manga artist, and found that their bibliography of works was very poorly formatted. Every other article had red text reading Error: {{nihongo}}: transliteration text not Latin script (pos 90) (help). Thankfully, anyone can edit Wikipedia, so if you come across this bug, here’s how you fix it:
- Edit the source of the section
- Switch to the source editor, not the visual one
- Find the template tag that is broken, it will look something like this Japanese example (other languages will share the same basic structure):
- {{Nihongo||風子のいる店|{{ill|Fūko no Iru Mise|ja|風子のいる店}}}}
- There is a second template tag beginning {{ill, before this, add the lt= parameter, as so:
- {{Nihongo||風子のいる店|lt={{ill|Fūko no Iru Mise|ja|風子のいる店}}}}
- Switch back to the visual editor to preview the fix
- Save the page, noting in the commit message that you fixed the tag
The fix is simple enough, but I had some trouble figuring out why it was happening, and how exactly to fix it. The issue seems to arise because this markup has two different template tags (a Wikimedia template sits between {{ braces }}), and one of them doesn’t like to be embedded within the other.
When this error occurs, the text is rendered with an additional link to a help page, here. Annoyingly, the actual error message is not explained on this page, nor is there any help for how to resolve it (I have since added extra help to that page). Instead, I started hunting around the help pages for transliteration and finally found my way to this page. This one is helpful, and it explains that you can nest templates, but it is best to use a named parameter to make sure it can be parsed correctly.
When using {{lang}} with {{Interlanguage link}}, use that template’s link-text parameter |lt=
It seems that on this particular page, every time a link was given to a Japanese language page, and an English transliteration offered, the lack of this parameter results in an error message being spat out into the article.
I am not a prolific Wikipedia editor, but I can see some opportunities to make this process a bit better:
- Fix the error message to point to the right help page, and make sure all possible errors are documented
- Don’t let editors commit changes if they are going to generate inline errors
- Detect if incompatible templates are being nested and suggest to use named parameters