[Foundation-l] [Toolserver-l] A blog comment.

[Nikola Smolenski]

On Wednesday 11 June 2008 23:03:28 Platonides wrote:
> I'm Ccing Wikitech, i suggest we follow this thread there.

I'm answering on the foundation-l, given that I don't follow wikitech-l, you 
do follow foundation-l, and the issues you raise are more community than 
software related.

> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>  > (thread about interwiki bots at toolserver)
> >
> > Coincidentally, yesterday I released a MediaWiki extension which, if
> > accepted on Wikimedia projects, may make interwiki bots much less busy.
> > See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_newer_look_at_the_interwiki_link
>
> It also works by manual writing of the interwikis. I don't think it's
> the good way.
> *You're not taking into account page moves. What will you do when a page
> is moved? (by a low tech user which knows nothing about the global wiki)

I am taking into account page moves. Right now, when a page is moved, if it 
has 20 interwiki links, someone has to update 20 pages on 20 Wikipedias. With 
the extension, someone has to update a single page on a single wiki - 
clearly, something that is easier to do.

> *The articles will still have a 'preferred' title at the interwiki wiki.
> That means discussing about article titles, "Move to English name", "No,
> that's not", "Interwikis with pages on Chinese are ugly!"...

I proposed an easy and fair solution: use the name of the page on the first 
wiki that covered the topic. If a topic has first been written about on the 
Vietnamese Wikipedia, use the Vietnamese name. Either way, redirects work, 
and even edit wars of this kind should pose no problem.

> IMHO it should be a shared table referencing the wiki and page ids.
> Then you provide a Special page showing all pages on that group. You'd
> reference it as 'include this page into the group XX:sometitle is on'.
> You can also provide some space for free-form commenting (such as
> explaining the difference with another page).
> Obviously, all of that must be properly logged, which with SUL should be
> much easier.

Everything that you described already exists, without the special page. The 
shared table is the langlinks table on the central wiki; you reference it by 
using {{#interlanguage:sometitle}}; free-form commenting is the text on the 
central wiki page; it is properly logged in the page history.