On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:20 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
From a biography of the same president in another language, I can copy a list of interwiki links. But instead I should just copy a single, global interwiki pointer. As far as I understand, this is how the interlanguage extension should work.
What stops us from trying that out? Could it be introduced in small steps, or is it a big scary change?
I think it would be a big change. At the moment we have a single database per wiki, and no actual connection between the various databases. As far as I know the only exception to that is the images from Commons, but your idea goes further than that, because I cannot change a picture on Commons by editing a wiki page elsewhere. This would both be a large conceptual change and a technical issue (suppose the 'interwiki database' is down for writing, what do we do when someone tries to edit a page?)
Apart from that there is the issue of naming of pages on this central depository. It seems you'd have to have an interwiki consensus about that... And then there's initial population - what do we do with the currently existing problems? I guess that's a point that could be done in small steps though (allow the 'old' and the 'new' system to exist in parallel for some time). What do you do with new problems? That is, what if the same subject is linked from 2 pages in one language? And what if A is of the opinion that a group of pages should all be the same 'interwiki group' and B that they should be two? Will we be getting cross-wiki edit wars?