On Sat, 2005-06-04 at 15:10 +0100, Timwi wrote:
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.
Well, I think a proposal like this could still reduce duplication significantly, and would work fine even in the above scenario. (Note: I haven't looked up the real article names; I'm making up article names for the following.) For instance, you could have [[en:Vulcan]] (and [[ja:Vulcan]], and [[fr:Vulcan]], etc.) refer to [[interwiki:Vulcan]]; [[interwiki:Vulcan]] would refer to [[en:Vulcan]], [[ja:Vulcan]], [[fr:Vulcan]], and [[de:Star Trek Races]]. The German article [[de:Star Trek Races]] would refer to [[interwiki:Star Trek Races]], which would refer to [[en:Star Trek]], [[ja:Star Trek]], [[fr:Star Trek]], and [[de:Star Trek Races]]. This cuts the number of lists-of-interwiki-links to maintain from 4 to 2. (I don't know if it actually reduces the amount of work involved in maintaining interwiki links, because I don't know how sophisticated the bots are.)
Carl Witty