[Mediawiki-l] "Unreal:" takes me to third-party site

Kevin Chen cyaugin at yahoo.com
Sat Sep 8 01:47:37 UTC 2007


Don't let me get in the way of your discussions, but I thought I should clarify that I wasn't trying to make "Unreal" into a namespace proper, it was just a part of the page title. Using the information provided about the database, I was able to find the offending interwiki record and delete it.

If I were to make a suggestion, it would be to disallow default third-party interwikis. This way you can't get blindsided by popular topics or by mere English words for that matter, both of which are true in my case. Failing that, there could be stricter naming guidelines, such as requiring the word "wiki" to be appended (e.g. unrealwiki). In total, though, IMO it's just bad form to provide third-party links to unsuspecting hosts or visitors, especially when there is no visible disclosure that this kind of thing could happen. I'm not clear on why these default links were included in the first place, unless maybe they contributed to the MW code?

At least, I am assuming that these interwikis are provided by default, since no one has yet chided me over an insecure server configuration. Removing default interwikis won't change the issues involved with hosts mixing namespaces and user-defined interwikis, of course, and I'm staying out of that discussion.
       
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