On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 1:08 PM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
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. :)
Do we really need to set criteria for a wiki being a candidate? Are we trying to keep the number of approved interwiki links down? I had in mind just letting everyone have a prefix and a URL that we would distribute.
Some might get the more preferable prefixes, though; e.g. we would have some sort of tiebreaker if, say, there were two wikis wanting to call themselves Foowiki and get the Foowiki: prefix. I guess we should continue this discussion on WikiApiary. I want to try to get someone (Jamie Thingelstad?) with authority to install extensions to give the go-ahead on the specs for the extension; once they're approved, there will be no reason not to start writing it. I was originally planning to work with WikiIndex but WikiApiary seems like a better idea. By the way, I like how they note that they're monitoring over 9,300https://encyclopediadramatica.es/Over_9000wikis.
It might help that WikiApiary runs SMW. Maybe the extension could be written to interact with it in some way that would be more elegant than using tag or parser functions to insert metadata into the database à la the {{setbpdprop: }} of Extension:BedellPenDragonhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BedellPenDragon .