On 9/12/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
For many years now, it has been asked if we could have ISSN support similar to the ISBN support. ISSN are International Standard Serial Numbers, identifying newspapers and journals (collectively called "serials" by librarians), such as Nature (ISSN 0028-0836) and Science (ISSN 0036-8075).
In case anyone isnt aware, there is a bug open for this:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3663
And I have asked for input on whether this is important to pursue at a new wikiproject that has been formed to work on journals:
Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Academic_Journals#ISSNs_required
On 9/12/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
Some way to access a post/get value in a page would do it, then you could just link to Wikipedia:Serial sources?issn=12345678. I can imagine hundreds of potential security issues with that, though, so it would have to be done very carefully. It could have lots of uses, though.
How would this be linked?
[[Wikipedia:Serial sources?issn=1234-5678|1234-5678]]
or
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Serial_sources&issn=...]
or throwing convention to the wind, adding params by extending the internal link format:
[[Wikipedia:Serial sources|1234-5678|issn=1234-5678|param2=foo]]
Not bad. The obvious way to implement that is to receive CGI parameters as if they were template parameters. For the above example, the template would then use {{{issn}}} rather than MAGICNUMBER. Or just {{{1}}} for Serial_sources?12345678
We can get away with Serial_sources?12345678 and Serial_sources?12345678&87654321 to also fill {{{2}}}, however as CGI & HTML forms are designed around name=value pairs, I think that unnamed parameters would be better handled as numbered params, like Serial_sources?1=12345678&2=87654321.
One potential problem is that this opens a back door for sneaking in contents, making it look like official Wikipedia contents. For example, if the [[Wikipedia:Recommends]] page says "Wikipedia endorses {{{1}}}" and external websites link to Wikipedia:Recommends?Encyclopedia+Britannica
Is this a problem only for cross-site linking? Should CGI parameters to templates be null and void if the referer is a remote site?
The referrer is a client side feature; it can be disabled in firefox with the config option network.http.sendRefererHeader
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.sendRefererHeader
If we want to get around that, when the mediawiki software constructs a real URL from an internal link that uses these additional params, it could also embed a token to be used to verify that the link came from an internal link rather than a foreign site. The token would need to be a moving target to prevent foreign sites being able to use it.
-- John Vandenberg (en:User:Jayvdb)