Proposal:Interwiki list

Proposal

With reference to the grand scheme for interwiki prefix standardization, what do you think of the idea of hosting the interwiki list on this wiki? It would be a page with all the interwiki prefixes and their urls, e.g.:

wikipedia|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1|1
wikiquote|http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/$1|1
wikisource|http://wikisource.org/wiki/$1|1

The list would include not only Wikimedia Foundation wikis, but almost all the 20,000+ wikis in the wikisphere. The idea is to supersede the current 93-wiki list that is distributed with MediaWiki installations, and allow wikis to poll this list instead every 10-15 minutes for new data, much as they currently poll the spam blacklist using Extension:SpamBlacklist. WMF has refused to add wikis to the interwiki map that aren't frequently linked from WMF wikis, so that list won't suffice for our needs. Leucosticte (talk) 04:58, 11 November 2012 (PST)

My initial thoughts are that you may be onto something. However, I'm not 100% sure on what you are specifically asking. Are you wanting to simply create an archive list of the say 20,000 MediaWiki wikis . . . or do you want us to basically host the entire InterWiki list for any of those 20,000 MW wikis to poll our server? Because it it is the latter, I'm confident we don't have those kinds of server resources, so that would be a surefire way to crash WikiIndex. Another problem is that individual wikis may edit their own InterWiki table, and modify the same wiki with differing prefixes.

I think you are correct to raise it over on the MW meta site. WMF needs to look at the terms of GFDL license which the MW software is released . . . I'm no expert on licenses, but if MediaWiki is supposedly 'Open Source' software, then surely they should allow the MW software to be modified with an appropriate InterWiki list which is fit for the 21st Century wikisphere. Others need to weigh in with this discussion. Best --Sean, aka Hoof Hearted • _Admin • talk2HH 15:21, 17 November 2012 (PST)

If you're interested, the implementing code is at Extension:InterwikiMap. Leucosticte (talk) 08:14, 18 November 2012 (PST)

Canonical interwiki prefixes

Please see Canonical interwiki prefixes. What should we do about all these wikis with names that start with "The"? In determining the interwiki prefix, should we just dump the "The"? E.g., why does The Crochet Wiki need to have that "The"? It isn't about a film called The Crochet or anything like that. Leucosticte (talk) 00:04, 22 November 2012 (PST)

Personally, the word "The" should be stripped from all those wikis, unless they are explicitly known with a leading "The" in their title (I can't think of any wikis at the moment, but say there was a wiki for The Times newspaper, that should stay). I've moved The Crochet Wiki to Crochet Wiki - the name field in the infobox template is used a manual override, but the page now gets categorised under the letter C. And even if it were about a film called The Crochet, neither the film, nor the wiki would be notable enough to retain the leading "The".

But another far more important issue is that a massive number of wikis have been catalogued here on WikiIndex with a CamelCase name, when a huge number of them don't actually use CamelCase. Sean, aka Hoof Hearted • _Admin • talk2HH 06:11, 22 November 2012 (PST)