> So, why not add a new field to the database, for
each
> article, where LanguageLinks and the like can be "collected"?
Please put the language links in a separate table,
otherwise
you are violating the first normal form of database design
theory. Any introductory text on database design will tell you
why that is bad.
The Wikipedia database layout is already pretty far from
normalized (mainly because MySQL is too slow on joins), but if
I did add this feature I would make it a proper one-to-one
mapping table. I'm not yet convinced that it would be worth
the effort, though. I'm more inclined to think that the
international wikis should be more independent and encapsulated.
I like the idea of links for categories
('biography', 'country',
'mathematical theorem', 'book', 'movie', ...) by the way.
We discussed tings like that early on, and initially rejcted it
as an attempt to categorize articles in a non-wiki way; we wanted
different organization schemes to evolve out of normal wiki
editing and linking, rather than imposing order from the outside.
But it might be time to revisit the idea, because at 2,500 edits
a day and growing, it's just no longer possible for one person to
keep track of edits to articles he's interested in, and subject
is the only filter that really makes sense for reducing that data
to a manageable level. I'd still like to see if we couldn't
build those subjects automatically in some way based on links in
the database.