27 · The thing and the page

When the second language version was being set up, a decision was made: the instances do not share a database. Comments, ratings and views belong to the text in a particular language. It sounded coherent and it survived twelve hours.

It was overturned by a sentence from the instance’s author: but this is one site, only bilingual. A simple sentence, with a serious consequence — because if it is one site, you have to ask separately about every thing recorded beside it: **what is it actually about?**

The answer is not the same for everything — but the first attempt to state it was wrong, and it is worth leaving here together with the correction. What I wrote then was: a rating says “this text, in the form in which I read it, is worth this much”, so it measures THE PAGE and stays separate. That sounded coherent for a few hours.

It does not hold. A reader does not rate the quality of a translation — they rate the text. A star under the English translation says the same thing as a star under the Polish original. The practical consequence of splitting them was immediate anyway: the English version showed “nobody has rated this yet” while a hundred and sixty-two votes stood on the other side.

After the correction the border runs like this: **a rating and a comment are about THE THING; a view is about THE PAGE.** A view alone measures the fact that a particular translation was opened by a particular reader, and it alone stays separate. The sum of ratings and the conversation are shared, counted by the entry key. The language a vote was cast in is recorded beside the vote — it tells us who reads which side, and it does not split the result.

A comment says something else. It is about THE THING the text is about: what happened, the sentence that touched someone, a question for the author. That does not change with the language of the translation. So the conversation under an entry should be one, shared by both versions — and what binds it is the entry key, because the slug is in the language of the content and reads differently on the other side.

This is the same border that was drawn earlier for files — where it turned out to run along language rather than format — only it falls in a different place. A photograph has no language and stands once. A quote card carries language and stays with the instance. A comment has no language in the sense of belonging, even though it was written in one: it belongs to the thing, not to the translation.

Hence the translation of a comment as a VIEW, not a copy. It sits beside the original, keyed by comment and language, rather than as a second comment in a second database. The original stays the only one, so deleting it takes the translation with it, and the commenter’s personal data does not spread across systems. The same principle as with photographs: one home, everything else is a view.