On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 9:00 AM, go moko <gomoko(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
What if filling
the interwiki table with predefined links was an
installation option, possibly with
several lists, and void?
Probably won't (and shouldn't) happen, since we're trying to keep the
installer options close to the bare minimum. Changing or clearing the
interwiki table is pretty easy with the right script or special page. The
fact that, when the installer's interwiki list was changed in 2013, it was
accurate to say "This list has obviously not been properly updated for many
years. There are many long-dead sites that are removed in this patch"
suggests that third party wikis are pretty good at ignoring interwiki links
they don't want or need.
I disagree that "collisions are very rare, and none of the alternatives
seem viable or practical". Collisions (or whatever one would call them)
happen fairly often, and the resulting linking
errors<https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ALeucosticte&…
be hard to notice because one sees the link is blue and assumes it's
going where one wanted it to.
It wouldn't be such a problem if wikis would name their project namespace
Project: rather than the name of the wiki. Having it named Project: would
be useful when people are importing user or project pages from Wikipedia
(e.g. if they wanted to import userboxes or policy pages) and don't want
the Wikipedia: links to become interwiki links. I would be in favor of
renaming the project namespaces to Project: on Wikimedia wikis; that's how
it is on
MediaWiki.org (to avoid a collision with the MediaWiki: namespace)
and it seems to work out okay. I'll probably start setting up my third
party wikis that way too, because I've run into similar problems when
exporting and importing content among them. Perhaps the installer should
warn that it's not recommended to name the meta namespace after the site
name.
Tim's proposal seems pretty elegant but in a few situations will make links
uglier or hide where they point to. E.g. "See also" sections with interwiki
links (like what you see
here<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Interwiki_linking#See_also>)
could become like the "Further reading" section you see
here<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines#Fur…
which one has to either put barelinks or make people hover over the
link
to see the URL it goes to.
Interwiki page existence detection probably wouldn't be any more difficult
to implement in the absence of interwiki prefixes. We could still have an
interwiki table, but page existence detection would be triggered by certain
URLs rather than prefixes being used. I'm not sure how interwiki
transclusion would work if we didn't have interwikis; we'd have to come up
with some other way of specifying which wiki we're transcluding from,
unless we're going to use URLs for that too.
In short, I think the key is to come up with something that doesn't break
silently when there's a conflict between an interwiki prefix and namespace.
For that purpose, it would suffice to keep interwiki linking and come up
with a new delimiter. But changing the name of the Project: namespace would
work just as well. Migration of links could work analogously to what's
described in bug
60135<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60135>
.
TTO, you were saying "I'm not getting a coherent sense of a direction to
take" -- that could be a good thing at this point in the discussion; it
could mean people are still keeping an open mind and wanting to hear more
thoughts and ideas rather than making too hasty of a conclusion. But I
guess it is helpful, when conversations fall silent, for someone to push
for action by asking, "...so, in light of all that, what do you want to
do?" :)