If I write a [[link]] it will be blue if the page exists and red otherwise.
But if I write [[:sw:link]] that will be an external or cross-wiki link,
that is never red, as if it were impossible to know whether that page
existed in Swahili Wikipedia.
But determining the existence of a page is just a quick database table
lookup, and all databases run on WMF's servers, so it shouldn't be more
expensive to look up a cross-wiki link, as long as it is one of WMF's wikis.
In Wiktionary, it is common to link to entries in foreign languages both
on the local wiki and to the native wiki for that language. For example,
in English Wikitionary the entry for "blue" links to the Swahili word "bluu"
both on en.wiktionary and on sw.wiktionary, using the template
{{t+|sw|bluu}}.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blue#Translations
But since the Afrikaans translation "blou" doesn't have an entry on the
Afrikaans Wiktionary, another template is used: {{t|af|blou}}. And it is
a pain to know which one of these two templates to use. If it was possible
in {{#ifexists}} to determine the existence of a page in another wiki,
only one template would be needed, and the bot job to change to the right
template would not be needed.
#ifexist already works across namespaces (well, of course), so is there any
good reason it shouldn't work across wikis?
Oddly, the documentation says #ifexist is an "expensive" parser function.
That doesn't make much sense to me. It's as if red/blue links were
expensive, and most of our list pages should be banned.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions#.23ifexist
--
Lars Aronsson ([email protected])
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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