On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:20 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)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?
--
André Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com