I just recently started to play with interwiki.py (Pywikipedia bot
framework) for propagating interwiki links. My interest comes
from organizing the category tree, so I'm focusing on interwiki
links between categories. Interwiki bots normally run in
autonomous mode, but this means they give up on complicated cases.
If I run this script under manual supervision, without the
"-autonomous" option, it stops and asks me how to resolve each
conflict. This happens ever so often. I have now (manually)
sorted out the interwiki links between all languages of
Category:Knowledge, which was intertwined with Category:Science,
and Category:Austrian writers which was mixed up with
Category:Austrian literature. Such mistakes easily happen, of
course. Who can spot errors in all these languages?
Many languages had interwiki links from their category for
Austrian writers to the Japanese category for Austrian literature.
I'm not sure exactly when or where this error originated. But on
June 19, 2007, the English and Spanish Wikipedia's interwiki link
to Japanese changed from Austrian novelists to Austrian
literature, i.e. from one error to another. Ten days later, this
link was copied to the Dutch Wikipedia. The error was corrected on
en.wikipedia on October 1, 2007, but remained on other languages.
Yes, that's 15 months ago.
The circular interwiki link structure from en:Category:Austrian
writers to es:CategorÃa:Escritores de Austria to ja:... and back
to en:Category:Austrian literature is such a conflict that makes
interwiki.py give up when it runs in autonomous mode.
Thus, corrections (as on October 1) do not propagate. Instead a
report about the conflict is given in a logfile, but apparently
nobody had fixed this problem in the last 15 monhts. This
conflict also blocked new interwiki links from propagating.
After I cleared up the mess, 21 new interwiki links were added to
the category on the Russian Wikipedia (one where I have a bot
flag). That means 21 languages of Wikipedia had created
categories (or announced them to the interwiki system) for
Austrian writers in the last 15 months, and they all added their
interwiki link to the English Wikipedia. But these additions did
not propagate because of the conflict.
So, my question:
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?
In the longer term, we need to redesign the interwiki links into a
centralized system, that can be maintained. I think the way to do
this is to use Wikimedia Commons. Instead of copying all the
interwiki links to every language of Wikipedia, it should be
enough to add {{commons|Category:Writers from Austria}}, and the
rest should happen automatically.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se