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Steve Bennett wrote:
Why exactly do we have these "interwiki" links that go to projects with no connection to WikiMedia? Why not just use templates:
{{youtube|foo}} (which might expand to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%7B%7B%7B1%7D%7D%7D%7C%7B%7B%7B1%7D%7D%7D at YouTube.com]
rather than
[[YouTube:foo]]
for instance.
Why is it preferable that they be in the software itself?
The interwiki link system (and a bunch of the items in the list) predate the existence of MediaWiki; we inherited it from UseModWiki which was used for Wikipedia's first year.
These days, templates may well be the best way to handle such.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)