On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 4:53 AM, This, that and the other <
at.light(a)live.com.au> wrote:
1. Split the existing interwiki map on Meta [2] into a
"global interwiki
map",
located on
MediaWiki.org (draft at [3]), and a "WMF-specific interwiki
map"
on Meta (draft at [4]). Wikimedia-specific interwiki prefixes, like
bugzilla:, gerrit:, and irc: would be located in the map on Meta,
whereas
general-purpose interwikis, like orthodoxwiki: and wikisource: would go
to
the "global map" at
MediaWiki.org.
Why is it worth the trouble of maintaining two separate lists? Do the
Wikimedia-specific interwiki prefixes get in people's way, e.g. when
they're reading through the interwiki list and encounter what is, to them,
useless clutter? As the list starts getting longer (e.g. hundreds,
thousands or tens of thousands of prefixes), people will probably do a Find
on the list rather than scrolling through, so it may not matter much if
there's that little bit of extra clutter. Sometimes I do use those
Wikimedia-specific prefixes on third-party wikis (e.g. if I'm talking about
MediaWiki development issues), and they might also end up getting used if
people import content from Wikimedia wikis.
* Define a proper scope for the interwiki map. At the
moment it is a bit
unclear what should and shouldn't be there. The fact that we currently
have
a Linux users' group from New Zealand and someone's personal blog on the
map
suggests the scope of the map have not been well thought out over the
years.
My suggested criterion at [3] is:
People will say we should keep those interwikis for historical reasons. So,
I think we should have a bot ready to go through the various wikis and make
edits converting those interwiki links to regular links. We should make
this tool available to the third-party wikis too. Perhaps it could be a
maintenance script.
"Most well-established and active wikis
should have interwiki
prefixes, regardless of whether or not they are using MediaWiki
software.
Sites that are not wikis may be acceptable in some cases,
particularly if they are very commonly linked to (e.g. Google,
OEIS)."
Can we come up with numerical cutoffs for what count as "well-established",
"active", and "very commonly linked to", so that people know what to
expect
before they put a proposal forth, or will it be like notability debates,
and come down to people's individual opinions of what should count as "very
commonly linked to" (as well as a certain amount of
ILIKEIT<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arguments_to_avoid_in_de…
IDONTLIKEIT, even if users deny that's the basis for their decision)?
We might get the help of WikiIndex and (especially) WikiApiary in getting
the necessary statistics.
** Many of the links are long dead. (snip)
** We could add API URLs to fill the iw_api column in the database
(currently
empty by default).
Those two should be uncontroversial.
Sorry for the long message, but I really think this
topic has been
neglected
for such a long time.
It's okay, it's a complicated subject with a lot of tricky implementation
decisions that need to be made (which is probably part of why it's been
neglected). Thanks for taking the time to do a thorough analysis.