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