Elly Waterman wrote:
Actually I think the system of interwiki links is not
optimal at all.
It would be better, to have a central location were all the
interwiki's are listed, like commons. [...]
I think your proposal is mostly working from the assumption that there
exists a one-to-one mapping between the articles of one Wikipedia and
all the articles of all the other Wikipedias. Unfortunately, some
Wikipedias are a bit pig-headed and almost deliberately ensure that this
assumption can never hold. For example, the German Wikipedia seems to
have a rule that forbids it to ever have an article like [[Vulcan (Star
Trek)]]. Instead, the interwiki link on the English article links to a
German article about all Star Trek races which is very much less
detailed. Obviously, there can never be a link back to the English article.
Ideally, maybe all Wikipedians should decide independently of language
what articles should or should not exist, and then write those articles
in all languages. Unfortunately, this idea is doomed because some
Wikipedians have a very strong "localist attitude" -- any idea that
would combine decision-making across several Wikipedias would be passed
off and rejected as "rule from en". Supposedly, Wikipedians who do not
speak language X are not supposed to have any say whatsoever on what
happens on the language-X Wikipedia.
Timwi