[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

[Ray Saintonge]

Timwi wrote:

> This is a fair point, but nonetheless an implementation that I'm not 
> entirely comfortable with. (Admittedly, I can't think of a better one 
> other than to encourage the entire wiki community to go entirely 
> multi-lingual and have all wikis standardise on a 
> [[<sitename>:<langcode>:<pagename>]] syntax for links to other wiki 
> sites...) 

I very much agree with this, but I would make it even simpler.  It needs 
to be uniform and easily understood by non technical users.  It should 
also be usable in the same way from any project.  I would promote the 
format [[wwLLL:pagename]] where the ws represent the project, and the Ls 
(not necessarily capitalized) represent the language.  The language part 
may be reduced to two letters, as would be the case with most major 
languages.  All top level projects would have a w code.  (There should 
be enough to go around unless we outdo ourseves in the development of 
entirely new projects.)
Default situations can be easily defined, and allowances can be made for 
intrawiki namespaces.

> Another major disadvantage I thought of just now is that it poisons 
> our namespace. Suppose some silly company makes some sort of product 
> and (to be cool) calls it "fr:ea:ky". How would we name our article on 
> it? It's only a matter of time until this will be an actual problem.

It's a losing battle to try to accomodate every "fre:aky" broadband 
troll; they're always ready to throw another spammer in the machinery. :-)

Ec