I think namespace and language should be orthogonal. Unless we can unambigously discern language codes and namespace names, a different delmiter should be used. One could mandate namespaces to have at least four letters, though.
I'd prefer to keep the : as delimiter for both. This is, of course, only my opinion, based on the fact that it would mean a major rewrite of some parts of the software;) Really, I think mostly "old folks" will do the interlinking anyway, and they'll know the differences. I doubt many people will come in, have a look, and make an interlink as their first try. I'm not saying "f**k the newcomers" (we all were, once), but this *is* a little more difficult than fixing a typo, no matter how you design interface and data structure.
With "automatic collection" I mean this: The U.S. article (should the interneation wikipedia be "us:" namespace??) links to the German article.
Eh, eh, its an /English/ article, so its code should be en.
Yeah, someone mentioned this already (I think Larry?).
IMO it is easier to just keep the equivalence information in an area separate from any specific language and always up-to-the-minute. So if someone changes the information "en:A is equivalent to de:A" to "en:A1 is equivalent to de:A" all consequences are propagated immediately.
My idea was to give the crowd a way to interlink the articles at all, if only manually, in the beginning. An additional script could then bind them together (no, I didn't overdose on "Lord of the Rings";) The obvious way is to use these "fake namespaces" for normal links within the article. But, any automatic interlinking then means to alter one or several article bodies (usually, appending links) across wikipedias. Doing this in runtime might prove much more difficult than doing it once a week in one "flush".
So, what I'm trying to say is, IMO we should switch scripts (soon), have the "manual mode", wait until things are running smoothly again, and then we'll see.
Saying "running smoothly": Is wikipedia currently switching servers? I get lots of 400 errors...
Magnus