On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 4:53 AM, This, that and the other < at.light@live.com.au> wrote:
- 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.
Why is it worth the trouble of maintaining two separate lists? Do the Wikimedia-specific interwiki prefixes get in people's way, e.g. when they're reading through the interwiki list and encounter what is, to them, useless clutter? As the list starts getting longer (e.g. hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of prefixes), people will probably do a Find on the list rather than scrolling through, so it may not matter much if there's that little bit of extra clutter. Sometimes I do use those Wikimedia-specific prefixes on third-party wikis (e.g. if I'm talking about MediaWiki development issues), and they might also end up getting used if people import content from Wikimedia wikis.
- 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:
People will say we should keep those interwikis for historical reasons. So, I think we should have a bot ready to go through the various wikis and make edits converting those interwiki links to regular links. We should make this tool available to the third-party wikis too. Perhaps it could be a maintenance script.
"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)."
Can we come up with numerical cutoffs for what count as "well-established", "active", and "very commonly linked to", so that people know what to expect before they put a proposal forth, or will it be like notability debates, and come down to people's individual opinions of what should count as "very commonly linked to" (as well as a certain amount of ILIKEIThttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arguments_to_avoid_in_deletion_discussions#I_like_itand IDONTLIKEIT, even if users deny that's the basis for their decision)? We might get the help of WikiIndex and (especially) WikiApiary in getting the necessary statistics.
** Many of the links are long dead. (snip)
** We could add API URLs to fill the iw_api column in the database
(currently empty by default).
Those two should be uncontroversial.
Sorry for the long message, but I really think this topic has been neglected for such a long time.
It's okay, it's a complicated subject with a lot of tricky implementation decisions that need to be made (which is probably part of why it's been neglected). Thanks for taking the time to do a thorough analysis.