On 11/14/2013 09:53 AM, Nathan Larson wrote:
Is there reason to think that a decentralized system
would be likely to
evolve, or that it would be optimal? It seems to me that most stuff in the
wikisphere is centered around WMF; e.g. people usually borrow templates,
the spam blacklist, MediaWiki extensions, and so on, from WMF sites. Most
wikis that attempted to duplicate what WMF does have failed to catch on;
As mentioned by Mark and quoted in my email,
http://wikiapiary.com/
could be a good starting point.
Just improvising a hypothetical starting point for a process to maintain
the decentralized interwiki table:
In order to become a candidate, a wiki must have the extension installed
and a quantifiable score based on age, size, license, and lack of
reports as spammer.
The extension could perhaps check how much a wiki is linked by how many
wikis pof which characteristics, calculating a popularity index of
sorts. Maybe you can even have a classification of topics filtering the
langage and type of content that matters to your wiki. By default, only
wikis above some popularity index would be included in your local
interwiki table. The admins could fine tune locally.
The master interwiki table could be hosted in Wikiapiary or wherever. It
would be mirrored in some wahy by the wikis with the extension installed
willing to do so.
The maintenance of the table itself doesn't even look like a big deal,
compared to developing the extension and adding new interwiki features.
It would be based on the userbase of wiki installing the extension.
Whether Wikimedia projects join the interwiki party of not, that would
depend on the extension being ready for Wikimedia adoption annd a
decision to deploy it. But that would be a Wikimedia discussion, not a
Interwiki project discussion.
As said, all of the above is improvised and hypothetical. Sorry in
advance for any planning flaws. :)
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil