Hoi,
Today, the bot that I run has passed the 100.000 edit marks on the
English Wiktionary. This is a result that is nice but still, I have very
much mixed feelings about it. It is a good thing because having the
interwiki links on Wiktionary promotes cooperation. The bad sentiment is
because it is such a waste of resources. For Wiktionary it is not that
bad; I just run the bot and it is process that is largely automatic. I
do check every now and again, sometimes the software is updated and that
does merit some checking.
For Wikipedia the situation is in my opinion more bleak. Many people
spend a lot of effort in getting the interwiki links right. Where the
Wiktionary process is a simple automatic process, the Wikipedia
interwiki is a laborious affair. It is also a process where we know that
a change because of some disambiguation is only done after some time.
Many of the smaller wikipedia projects do not have people working on the
interwiki links and it is here where the interwiki links would be most
valuable.
It has been argued in the past that some innovation for the interwiki
process is needed. There are some suggestions on Meta...
Oh yes, the Wiktionary process allows me to update concurrently on MANY
wiktionaries. When you add up all the updates that RobotGMwikt has done,
it could be something like 250.000+. Then again, I do not care that much
about such statistics. It is just an indicator for the need for innovation.
Thanks,
GerardM
