2009/1/6 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se:
Has anybody mapped exactly how many such interwiki conflicts we have? Or how many interwiki sets do we have without conflicts? Could/should someone make a list of current conflicts and try to rank them by importance, so we can get started in fixing them?
Someone actually did this, it was discussed a few months ago on wikien-l. (I'm writing this in my lunch hour, so haven't time to track down the thread in the archive right now, sorry.)
But basically: treating interwiki links as a 1-1 relationship even from one wiki to another is horribly unreliable, and assuming you can go from wiki A to wiki B to wiki C with interwiki links is just not doable reliably with robots.
It's not quite as horrible as trying to make ontological sense of the category tree (where the only relationship that can be presumed is "has something to do with" - one of the reasons that making cats work like tags with a good complex Boolean query frontend would be so useful), but it's in the same realms of hair-tearing horror for the same reasons, i.e. people are a problem.
- d.