On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:56 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
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.
These are some good points. I've run into a problem many times when importing pages (e.g. templates and/or their documentation) from Wikipedia, that pages like [[Wikipedia:Signatures]] become interwiki links to Wikipedia mainspace rather than redlinks. Also, usually I end up accessing interwiki prefixes through templates like Template:whttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Wanyway. It would be a simple matter to make those templates generate URLs rather than interwiki links. The only other way to prevent these conflicts from happening would be to use a different delimiter besides a single colon; but what would that replacement be?
Before retiring the interwiki map, we could run a bot to edit all the pages that use interwiki links, and convert the interwiki links to template uses. A template would have the same advantage as an interwiki link in making it easy to change the URLs if the site were to switch domains or change its URL scheme.