[WikiEN-l] Sister project templates for non-sister projects

Wed Apr 27 07:41:11 UTC 2005

Angela (beesley at gmail.com) [050427 15:03]:

> I feel Wikipedia has way too many of these boxes already, and we need
> to make sure these don't proliferate by allowing any free content site
> to add their link in this proposed box if that link is not useful to
> readers of that article.

Jamesday has occasionally threatened to switch templates off altogether
when the database is having a particularly hard time of it. While drastic,
after one too many boxes this solution does have a certain appeal.

> For promoting Wikimedia's own projects, the template is more
> justifiable, but even there, I would prefer if this was regarded more
> as meta data than as article content. Generating sister project links
> automatically, or having them as part of the interface rather than the
> article would be far preferable. Anthere made a request in bugzilla
> related to this last year
> (<http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708>).

They are metadata, really. A place for this sort of related *internal*
metadata (which Wikicities and Wikitravel content most certainly isn't)
would be a very useful thing. Same for spoken versions of articles (there's
some dispute on en: where and how to link these). It's the sort of stuff
that *almost* belongs in the interwiki language links, but *not quite*.

- d.