Long message coming up... please be brave and take a look :)
This is a proposal to try and bring order to the messy area of interwiki linking and interwiki prefixes, particularly for non-WMF users of MediaWiki.
At the moment, anyone who installs MediaWiki gets a default interwiki table that is hopelessly out of date. Some of the URLs listed there have seemingly been broken for 7 years [1]. Meanwhile, WMF wikis have access to a nice, updated interwiki map, stored on Meta, that is difficult for anyone else to use. Clearly something needs to be done to sort this out.
What I propose we do to improve the situation is along the lines of bug 58369:
1. Split the existing interwiki map on Meta [2] into a "global interwiki map", located on MediaWiki.org (draft at [3]), and a "WMF-specific interwiki map" on Meta (draft at [4]). Wikimedia-specific interwiki prefixes, like bugzilla:, gerrit:, and irc: would be located in the map on Meta, whereas general-purpose interwikis, like orthodoxwiki: and wikisource: would go to the "global map" at MediaWiki.org.
2. Create a bot, similar to l10n-bot, that periodically updates the default interwiki data in mediawiki/core based on the contents of the global map. (Right now, the default map is duplicated in two different formats [5] [6] which is quite messy.)
3. Write a version of the rebuildInterwiki.php maintenance script [7] that can be bundled with MediaWiki, and which can be run by server admins to pull in new entries to their interwiki table from the global map.
This way, fresh installations of MediaWiki get a set of current, useful interwiki prefixes, and they have the ability to pull in updates as required. It also has the benefit of separating out the WMF-specific stuff from the global MediaWiki logic, which is a win for external users of MW.
Two other things it would be nice to do:
* Define a proper scope for the interwiki map. At the moment it is a bit unclear what should and shouldn't be there. The fact that we currently have a Linux users' group from New Zealand and someone's personal blog on the map suggests the scope of the map have not been well thought out over the years. My suggested criterion at [3] is:
"Most well-established and active wikis should have interwiki prefixes, regardless of whether or not they are using MediaWiki software. Sites that are not wikis may be acceptable in some cases, particularly if they are very commonly linked to (e.g. Google, OEIS)."
* Take this opportunity to CLEAN UP the global interwiki map! ** Many of the links are long dead. ** Many new wikis have sprung up in the last few years that deserve to be added. ** Broken prefixes can be moved to the WMF-specific map so existing links on WMF sites can be cleaned up and dealt with appropriately. ** We could add API URLs to fill the iw_api column in the database (currently empty by default).
I'm interested to hear your thoughts on these ideas.
Sorry for the long message, but I really think this topic has been neglected for such a long time.
TTO
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PS. I am aware of an RFC on MediaWiki.org relating to this, but I can't see that gaining traction any time soon. This proposal would be a more light-weight way of dealing with the problem at hand.
[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/84303/ [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:This,_that_and_the_other/Interwiki_map [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:This,_that_and_the_other/Local_interwik... [5] http://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fcore.git/master/maintenance%2Finte... [6] http://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fcore.git/master/maintenance%2Finte... [7] https://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FWikimediaMaintenance...