On Dec 3, 2003, at 15:43, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Changing XxWikipedia: in-line links to :xx: in-line links does not solve the problem that XxWikipedia: does not work. :xx: needs to be reserved for easy in-line language linking /within/ a single project (such as Wiktionary when it finally gets internationalized - xx: links would therefore be magic language links) and the more explicit Xx{project_name} should a failsafe default that will work the same in any MediaWiki-powered project and meta.
It's much more difficult to maintain a huge number of parallel link systems and keep them running and in sync on an ever-growing number of sites. I will not make any more Xx{project_name} prefixes, and I'd prefer not to re-enable the (already deprecated) XxWikipedia ones that had previously existed.
To link between projects to a particular language in Wikipedia, use eg [[Wikipedia:fr:Une page]]. This puts the maintenance burden in a much smaller area (a single configuration file on one server) and should work in also interwiki links from other wikis that we don't control and can't spontaneously add interwiki prefixes too, such as MeatballWiki (where it would be WikiPedia:fr:Une_page since you need CamelCase on InterWikis there).
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)