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