Hello !
In several Wikimedia projects, the concept of Featured Articles (and
sometimes Good Articles and Featured Portals) has been created. It is
also quite common that an interlanguage link identifying an other
language' Featured Article uses a special list bullet [1]. To display
such a bullet, the most common technical hack uses Javascript : a
template adding an html element identified by an
id="interwiki-{{{1}}}-fa" [2], and a Common.js JS function adding a
special CSS (golden bullet) class to the corresponding interwiki
<li>element. Such a JS function usually iterates on every Interwiki
link, testing :
if ( document.getElementById( InterwikiLinks[i].className + "-fa" ) )
to search for an hypothetical interwiki-lang-fa tag [3]. One
getElementById call, searching through the whole DOM tree, is issued
per interlanguage link : eventually, this is costly.
According to fr:User:Maloq, on a page containing 100+ interlanguage
links, this delays the page loading by more than 1 second on the
client side [4]. This user concludes that the Javascript system has to
be changed, and calls for yet another Javascript hack; however we both
agreed that having an extension handling those Featured articles links
would be quite better. Now :
* Stop me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that we can reasonably
imagine an extension directly querying other wikis for an article
status to display the right bullet
* I first though of extending the interlanguage link syntax, to use a
new syntax approaching the Image one, for example [[fr:Test|FA]] or
[[es:blabla|GA]] to display the corresponding bullet next to the
interlanguage link. From what I know, extending the standard wiki
syntax is not permitted by the current hooks/tag extensions, am I
right on this ? Also, do you see a reasonable way to extend the
interlanguage link syntax without heavy consequences for the wikis not
using the Featured Article concept ?
* The standard idea to address that issue would be to create a new tag
extension, for example interpreting <promoted en="fa" fr="ga"
de="fa"
/>. I do not really consider that latter solution as very
user-friendly, do you have another idea / other syntax suggestions to
do this ?
[1]. See for example the interlanguage links of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-g%C5%8D_sakusen
[2].
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Link_FA&action=edit
[3].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.js : search for LinkFA()
[4]. {{fr}} :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Mod%C3%A8le:Lien_AdQ#Tests
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Nicolas Dumazet — NicDumZ [ nIk.d̪ymz ]
Deuxième année ENSIMAG.