[Foundation-l] Interlanguage extension

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Since there has been so much discussion about Interlanguage links
recently, i thought that it would be appropriate to raise another
issue, which has already been raised several times on Bugzilla, Meta
and Wikitech-l, but has not garnered enough attention.

I am referring to the problem with the current implementation of
Interlanguage links as a list of language codes with target article
names, which is placed at the end of the article's source in each
language. This makes the links a nightmare to maintain: doing it by
hand is practically impossible, so it is done by bots. The bots add a
huge number of not-very-useful edits to article histories, which is
somewhat annoying, but functionally they do a lot of the work Right.
They can't be perfect, however, because interwiki conflicts often
occur.

A simpler solution was proposed and implemented by Nikola Smolenski
about two years ago (see the links at the end). It still haven't been
enabled in the live WMF projects because of technical issues, which
seemed to me rather minor (although i might be wrong).

Wikitech-l is probably the right technical forum to discuss it, but i
wondered whether anyone of the less technical people are interested in
it.

Links for reference:

* http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:A_central_wiki_for_interlanguage_links
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_newer_look_at_the_interlanguage_link
(its talk page has important discussions!)
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15607
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_conflicts

Thanks for your attention.

-- 
אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
Amir Elisha Aharoni

http://aharoni.wordpress.com

"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore