On 16/01/14 22:06, This, that and the other wrote:
"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)."
I think the interwiki map should be retired. I think broken links should be removed from it, and no new wikis should be added.
Interwiki prefixes, local namespaces and article titles containing a plain colon intractably conflict. Every time you add a new interwiki prefix, main namespace articles which had that prefix in their title become inaccessible and need to be recovered with a maintenance script.
There is a very good, standardised system for linking to arbitrary remote wikis -- URLs. URLs have the advantage of not sharing a namespace with local article titles.
Even the introduction of new WMF-to-WMF interwiki prefixes has caused the breakage of large numbers of article titles. I can see that is convenient, but I think it should be replaced even in that use case. UI convenience, link styling and rel=nofollow can be dealt with in other ways.
-- Tim Starling