[Wikibots-l] Interwiki links between disamb and non-disamb pages

[Quistnix]

Daniel Herding wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I guess all of you who have used the interwiki bot have run into 
> conflicts where e.g. [[en:Mars (planet)]] links to [[xy:Mars]], but 
> [[xy:Mars]] has lately become a disambiguation page.
> 
> In such a case it's a complete mess to clean it up because you have to 
> manually change the 'Planet Mars' page in all languages and fix all the 
> bad xy: links. This problem is getting worse as we have a rising number 
> of active Wikipedias.
> 
> I want to propose a rule that there should never be any interwiki links 
> between disambiguation pages and non-disambiguation pages. If we 
> implemented this in PyWikipediaBot, all you had to do is fix the bad 
> link to xy: on one wiki and let the bot run on all the others.

And introduce the same problem on other pages.

> 
> Yuri has already created code to recognize disambiguation pages by the 
> {{disambiguation}} template, and we've got nearly all translations. So 
> implementing what I proposed would be extremely easy.
> 
> It should also replace the marking programmed by Yuri, which is causing 
> some trouble because warnfiles don't work properly anymore.
> 
> The downside would be that in some rare cases it is intended to have 
> interwiki links between disamb and non-disamb pages. But I think that 
> this is outweighed by the positive effect.
> 
> What do you think of it?
> 
> 
> Daniel

Dear Daniel,

Your solution will introduce at least as many problems as it will solve. 
  I don't think there is any other way to solve this problem than by 
sorting things by hand, or by more sophisticated robots.

One of the things I really would like to see in a robot is a warning as 
soon as it encounters an interwiki link back to another page in the 
language from which it is run, so an operator can accept or reject 
interwiki links before dozens of new and incorrect links have been gathered.

Regards,

Anton (Quistnix)