Talk:Canonical interwiki prefixes

Language issues

I would propose that all primary WMF projects get individual interwiki prefixes as follows:

• wp-en - for English Wikipedia
• wp-de - for German Wikipedia
• wp-es - for Spanish Wikipedia

etc, and the same for Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc. Hoof Hearted (talk) 13:46, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable enough. Or we could use enwiki, dewiki, etc. One issue, though: Special:Interwiki reflects that there already are prefixes for wikipedia in each language. Leucosticte (talk) 14:09, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I would be very wary of using your suggestion of enwiki dewiki, etc. Your suggestion appears sort of 'Wikipedia-centric', and whilst I'm sure no one would question Wikipedia's dominance in the global wiki-scale, not everyone would automatically equate the word 'wiki' to Wikipedia. I'm sure most global wiki-folks would recognise 'wp' as an abbreviation for Wikipedia though. Your suggestion would also have difficulties for the other WMF projects - how would it deal with say Wikiversity or Wikivoyage? I would respectfully propose: Wikiversity - wvers-en, wvers-de, Wikivoyage - wvoy-en, wvoy-de, Wiktionary - wkt-en, wkt-de, Wikiquote - wq-en, wq-de, Wikibooks - wb-en, wb-de, Wikispecies - wsp-en, wsp-de, Wikisource - source-en, source-de, Wikinews - wn-en, wn-de . . . etc, etc.

Also, the Special:Interwiki you quote appears to be very unique to this MediaWiki wiki - I've never seen that specific interwiki table (with those identical prefixes) on any other wiki - it appears to be very 'Wikimedia Foundation-centric'. The 'default' interwiki table looks very different. The interwiki on WikiIndex is very different, yet looks very similar to the vast majority of other MW-based wikis which are listed on WI.

Finally, you also need to be careful about what your ultimate goal is. Whilst it is very clear that the norm for all WMF projects is to 'reach out' and link to other wikis, there are many, many other wikis (non-WMF) which are very insular, and do not want to link to other wikis at all, and then there are those which will only link to English Wikipedia and nothing else. Those latter two groups will probably get a little angry if they are suddenly forced upon with an interwiki table which could potentially have links to over 200,000 other sites - I'm sure many could rightly shout of global enforced spamming! Have you actually done any 'market research' into the need for this global new interwiki table? Best regards, Hoof Hearted (talk) 08:54, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

What I had in mind was getting some initial feedback through this talk page, and then creating a first draft of the proposed standard interwiki map, and inviting more comment before finalizing it. Enwiki, dewiki, etc. are database names used in the backend. See http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html .

More than one list can circulate; my goal was mostly to standardize the prefixes so that we wouldn't have situations in which, say, one wiki uses rational: as its prefix for RationalWiki while another uses rationalwiki:. That causes problems when people import content from one wiki to another. The question of whether a wiki wants to have a RationalWiki prefix at all is another question; this just tells them, if you are going to use it, here's the standard prefix, and here's an easy way to download it along with a whole mess of other ones. Yeah, the interwiki list used on WMF projects is pretty WMF-centric; you can see their criteria for putting stuff on that list here. Leucosticte (talk) 03:28, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

I dont think it is a good idea to have aliases for each language of projects. The global list should have two tiers : project and language for projects which have multiple languages. i.e. w:de:foo, not dewp:foo. While 'w:de:' is currently understood to be merely 'w:' on the linking wiki (being en.wikipedia.org), with 'de:' only having meaning on the linked wiki (en.wikipedia), this means the linking wiki creates a link to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:foo , which is ugly. The extension should allow the linking wiki to parse w:de:foo as de.wikipedia.org. John Vandenberg (talk) 14:02, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree. Will this require a change to the code? Shall we file a bug? Leucosticte (talk) 15:27, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

The design should be completed first. Adding a language code to the interwikis table has been suggested a few times before. see bugzilla:4901#c3 John Vandenberg (talk) 09:30, 16 November 2013 (UTC)