"Tim Starling" wrote in message news:[email protected]...
I think the interwiki map should be retired. I think broken links
should be removed from it, and no new wikis should be added.
Interwiki prefixes, local namespaces and article titles containing a
plain colon intractably conflict. Every time you add a new interwiki
prefix, main namespace articles which had that prefix in their title
become inaccessible and need to be recovered with a maintenance script.
There is a very good, standardised system for linking to arbitrary
remote wikis -- URLs. URLs have the advantage of not sharing a
namespace with local article titles.
Even the introduction of new WMF-to-WMF interwiki prefixes has caused
the breakage of large numbers of article titles. I can see that is
convenient, but I think it should be replaced even in that use case.
UI convenience, link styling and rel=nofollow can be dealt with in
other ways.
-- Tim Starling
The one main advantage of interwiki mapping is the convenience you mention. They
save a great amount of unnecessary typing and remembering of URLs. Whenever we go
to any WMF wiki, we can simply type [[gerrit:12345]] and know that the link will
point where we want it to.
Some possible alternatives to our current system would include:
* to make people manually type out URLs everywhere (silly)
* to use cross-wiki linking templates instead of interwikis. This has its own set
of problems: cross-wiki transclusion is another area in sore need of attention (see
bug 4547); we need to decide which wikis get their own linking templates; how do we
deal with collisions between local and global (cross-wiki) templates? etc. To me,
it doesn't seem worth the effort.
* to introduce a new syntax for interwiki links that does not collide with internal
links (too ambitious?)
I personally favour keeping interwikis as we know them, as collisions are very rare,
and none of the alternatives seem viable or practical. Maybe the advent of
interactive editing systems like VisualEditor and Flow will make them obsolete, but
until then, editors need the convenience and flexibility that they offer when
writing wikitext.
It seems as though your proposal, Tim, relates to the WMF cluster. I'd be
interested to know what your thoughts are with relation to the interwiki table in
external MediaWiki installations.
TTO
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