For several months now, I have been busy with the interwiki links, using Rob Hoofts bot. The more I am working with it, the more work there has to be done, it seems. Others are also working hard on it. Actually I think the system of interwiki links is not optimal at all. It would be better, to have a central location were all the interwiki's are listed, like commons. The big advantage would be there is only one location where you have to put you interwikis, and were you can correct the errors. The number of edits would be reduced enormously. Maybe it could even be combined with the existing commons. The system could start by making a dump of all interwiki's from English wikipedia, which I think has the most interwiki's.
For instance for the article Bablefish:
- On the central location, there is a page Bablefish which lists all interwikis only. Maybe it needs one or two sentences for explanation, if required to explain the exact meaning. - On your local language wikipedia you have to link only to this page Bablefish. Automatically the links appears at the side of the article, the same way as we are used to now.
Of course there will be difficulties to solve, like which languages to be used. Will it be allowed to rename those pages (please don't). Maybe these both problems might be solved by redirects. I personally wouldn't care if the main language is English. Surely, these pages are only a technical means to streamline of the enormous amount of interwiki's. Has anyone ever estimated them? And how much effort all the editing costs? The name of these pages could be a number as well, but that is not how people like to work.
Maybe this has been suggested before, in that case, my apologies.
Elly Waterman