On 01/16/2014 07:56 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
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.
The underlying issue here is that we are still using wikitext as our primary storage format, rather than treating it as the textual user interface it is. With HTML storage this issue disappears, as interwiki links are stored with full URLs. When using the wikitext editor, prefixes are introduced correctly and on demand, so you get the convenience without the conflicts.
Currently Flow is the only project using HTML storage. We are working on preparing this for MediaWiki proper though, so in the longer term the interwiki conflict issue should disappear.
Gabriel