I noticed that the other-language links (links in the form [[fr:Japon]]
[[en:Japan]] [[eo:Japanio]] etc which are hidden in the article body but
listed by language name in the header bar, pointing to the article on
the current subject in the other-language wikis) are vanishing on cached
pages, because they're scanned and listed during the wiki->html link
parsing which of course doesn't occur when loading a cached page.
I've a hackish fix for that which explicitly seeks out the other-
language links for cached pages, but I don't like it very much. It's
inelegant, and two sets of code have to be maintained to do the same
thing in different contexts.
What I'd like to do is add a column to the cur table, something like
cur_links_languages which would be analogous to cur_links_linked and
cur_links_unliked. The list of inter-language links for a page would be
stored when the page is saved, then easily loaded up again along with
the cache. This would also make it easy to provide statistics on the
degree of linkage between language wikis. (No change in current
user-visible behavior except in fixing the obvious bug of vanishing
links, and potentially providing more information in special:Statistics
etc.)
Alternatively, we might have a separate database which contains nothing
but lists of connected articles. This could facilitate keeping the
other-language links consistent; if somebody adds an article "Japón" to
the Spanish wikipedia, it shouldn't be necessary to separately add
[[es:Jap%f3n]] to the English, French, Esperanto, etc. articles. Keeping
a central repository would mean that it only needs to be linked in with
the others once, and all linked articles will immediately benefit by
being able to list it without manual editing. Upside: added simplicity
for article writers, who don't have to maintain as many links. Downside:
added complexity for site maintainers, who have to run a second database
or not get all the other-language links. Also might be more difficult to
remove incorrectly linked articles.
An alternative to the separate link database might be a robot/automatic
process that occasionally looks through all the wikipedias checking for
consistency in the other-language links and automatically adding (or
alerting a human that one ought to add) new other-language links where
needed.
So what do people think? Should we try one of these, or should I just
check in my hackish fix for the meantime?
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)