On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 9:00 AM, go moko gomoko@yahoo.com wrote:
What if filling the interwiki table with predefined links was an
installation option, possibly with several lists, and void?
Probably won't (and shouldn't) happen, since we're trying to keep the installer options close to the bare minimum. Changing or clearing the interwiki table is pretty easy with the right script or special page. The fact that, when the installer's interwiki list was changed in 2013, it was accurate to say "This list has obviously not been properly updated for many years. There are many long-dead sites that are removed in this patch" suggests that third party wikis are pretty good at ignoring interwiki links they don't want or need.
I disagree that "collisions are very rare, and none of the alternatives seem viable or practical". Collisions (or whatever one would call them) happen fairly often, and the resulting linking errorshttps://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ALeucosticte&diff=1503289&oldid=1503284can be hard to notice because one sees the link is blue and assumes it's going where one wanted it to.
It wouldn't be such a problem if wikis would name their project namespace Project: rather than the name of the wiki. Having it named Project: would be useful when people are importing user or project pages from Wikipedia (e.g. if they wanted to import userboxes or policy pages) and don't want the Wikipedia: links to become interwiki links. I would be in favor of renaming the project namespaces to Project: on Wikimedia wikis; that's how it is on MediaWiki.org (to avoid a collision with the MediaWiki: namespace) and it seems to work out okay. I'll probably start setting up my third party wikis that way too, because I've run into similar problems when exporting and importing content among them. Perhaps the installer should warn that it's not recommended to name the meta namespace after the site name.
Tim's proposal seems pretty elegant but in a few situations will make links uglier or hide where they point to. E.g. "See also" sections with interwiki links (like what you see herehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Interwiki_linking#See_also) could become like the "Further reading" section you see herehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines#Further_readingin which one has to either put barelinks or make people hover over the link to see the URL it goes to.
Interwiki page existence detection probably wouldn't be any more difficult to implement in the absence of interwiki prefixes. We could still have an interwiki table, but page existence detection would be triggered by certain URLs rather than prefixes being used. I'm not sure how interwiki transclusion would work if we didn't have interwikis; we'd have to come up with some other way of specifying which wiki we're transcluding from, unless we're going to use URLs for that too.
In short, I think the key is to come up with something that doesn't break silently when there's a conflict between an interwiki prefix and namespace. For that purpose, it would suffice to keep interwiki linking and come up with a new delimiter. But changing the name of the Project: namespace would work just as well. Migration of links could work analogously to what's described in bug 60135https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60135 .
TTO, you were saying "I'm not getting a coherent sense of a direction to take" -- that could be a good thing at this point in the discussion; it could mean people are still keeping an open mind and wanting to hear more thoughts and ideas rather than making too hasty of a conclusion. But I guess it is helpful, when conversations fall silent, for someone to push for action by asking, "...so, in light of all that, what do you want to do?" :)