On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:56 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
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.
These are some good points. I've run into a problem many times when
importing pages (e.g. templates and/or their documentation) from Wikipedia,
that pages like [[Wikipedia:Signatures]] become interwiki links to
Wikipedia mainspace rather than redlinks. Also, usually I end up accessing
interwiki prefixes through templates like
Template:w<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:W>anywayanyway. It would
be a simple matter to make those templates generate URLs
rather than interwiki links. The only other way to prevent these conflicts
from happening would be to use a different delimiter besides a single
colon; but what would that replacement be?
Before retiring the interwiki map, we could run a bot to edit all the pages
that use interwiki links, and convert the interwiki links to template uses.
A template would have the same advantage as an interwiki link in making it
easy to change the URLs if the site were to switch domains or change its
URL scheme.