Merlijn van Deen wrote:
There are three possible solutions for this:
- Changing the interwiki links to link to the correct main page
- Letting the API resolve empty titles
- Resolving it client-side
All three have their disadvantages:
- Community outrage; additionally it needs more maintenance. The
current system is pretty fool-proof.
Why would this cause outrage? I know some communities like drama, but I don't see why changing "[[de:]]" to "[[de:Wikipedia:Hauptseite]]" would cause problems, and I don't think most projects change the location of their main page very often (even if they do, there should still be a redirect)
- The API consistently uses Title:newFromText to resolve the title.
This function is used all over mediawiki, however, so changing it makes {{}} a valid construct. This changes parser behaviour, which is (iirc) not acceptable. The alternative would be to add a conditional for every call to newFromText. Mediawiki normally uses Wiki::checkInitialQueries to resolve '', but it's not possible to use that function.
This would probably be the easiest, I don't really see any problems, unless we're worried about it being a breaking change for people who might rely on an empty string being an invalid title. Changing it in the API rather than Title would make more sense (since we only want the behavior change for the API).
- Brr. 'Main Page' language tables.