[Foundation-l] [Toolserver-l] A blog comment.

Sat Jun 14 22:44:48 UTC 2008

Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> On Wednesday 11 June 2008 23:03:28 Platonides wrote:
>> I'm Ccing Wikitech, i suggest we follow this thread there.
> 
> I'm answering on the foundation-l, given that I don't follow wikitech-l, you 
> do follow foundation-l, and the issues you raise are more community than 
> software related.

I'm not, and i disagree on that, but if the messages arrive to some of 
the other two lists, i'll read them anyway :)

>> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>>  > (thread about interwiki bots at toolserver)
>>> Coincidentally, yesterday I released a MediaWiki extension which, if
>>> accepted on Wikimedia projects, may make interwiki bots much less busy.
>>> See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_newer_look_at_the_interwiki_link
>> It also works by manual writing of the interwikis. I don't think it's
>> the good way.
>> *You're not taking into account page moves. What will you do when a page
>> is moved? (by a low tech user which knows nothing about the global wiki)
> 
> I am taking into account page moves. Right now, when a page is moved, if it 
> has 20 interwiki links, someone has to update 20 pages on 20 Wikipedias. With 
> the extension, someone has to update a single page on a single wiki - 
> clearly, something that is easier to do.

But the page has 20 interwikis to the right version. So a

>> *The articles will still have a 'preferred' title at the interwiki wiki.
>> That means discussing about article titles, "Move to English name", "No,
>> that's not", "Interwikis with pages on Chinese are ugly!"...
> 
> I proposed an easy and fair solution: use the name of the page on the first 
> wiki that covered the topic. If a topic has first been written about on the 
> Vietnamese Wikipedia, use the Vietnamese name. Either way, redirects work, 
> and even edit wars of this kind should pose no problem.

I know. But i think avoiding any name is better.

>> IMHO it should be a shared table referencing the wiki and page ids.
>> Then you provide a Special page showing all pages on that group. You'd
>> reference it as 'include this page into the group XX:sometitle is on'.
>> You can also provide some space for free-form commenting (such as
>> explaining the difference with another page).
>> Obviously, all of that must be properly logged, which with SUL should be
>> much easier.
> 
> Everything that you described already exists, without the special page. The 
> shared table is the langlinks table on the central wiki; you reference it by 
> using {{#interlanguage:sometitle}}; free-form commenting is the text on the 
> central wiki page; it is properly logged in the page history.

Mmm, you're right. I'd prefer using page_ids, but a more db guy than me 
should determine the efficiency difference of using ll_title (the page 
title) instead. I notice now that ll_title can't hold any wiki title, as 
it's a varchar(255) with namespace, while titles are stored varchar(255) 
without namespace everywhere else.