On 01/16/2014 07:56 PM, Tim Starling 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.
The underlying issue here is that we are still using wikitext as our
primary storage format, rather than treating it as the textual user
interface it is. With HTML storage this issue disappears, as interwiki
links are stored with full URLs. When using the wikitext editor,
prefixes are introduced correctly and on demand, so you get the
convenience without the conflicts.
Currently Flow is the only project using HTML storage. We are working on
preparing this for MediaWiki proper though, so in the longer term the
interwiki conflict issue should disappear.
Gabriel