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 re: Intermediawiki linking 

re: (My talk) First off: please don't get mad at me for what I say below. I say it in good faith, and most likely a naive view.It seems to me that you're going about interwiki-linking to the other wikimedia sites in an overly complex way. Wouldn't something along the same style as the inter-language wikipedia links (i.e. in the bar on the left of the page) be far better, and much more elegant? Not only would it reduce the amount of clutter on the page, it would also remove any issues with categories being named differently as the interlanguage links deal with this as a routine matter. Additionally, there are a number of bots that would be able to propagate these interwiki links (i.e. you'd add one set of links on, say, Wikipedia, and a bot could propagate them to all of the other sites).

I can see two issues with this: 1. it requires developer changes to the mediawiki code, 2. it's not possible to use tracking categories. Hopefully the first one of these shouldn't be too difficult to arrange, and if inter-wikimedia-ing becomes popular, I think that the benefit of the tracking categories is fairly minimal. ... or am I misunderstanding what you're doing? The above works nicely if you're just linking similar templates together, and even if you're making sure that they have similar functionality. However, if you're making sure that all of the templates _are exactly the same_, it's not so good. In this case, a system like that used at Help:Link would be better - having a single master copy (the best place I can see for this is on the meta), which is then copied over to all of the mediawiki wikis every so often. That copying could be done by a bot, say every 24 hours, with the template being flagged for human attention if it's been modified anywhere but on meta. Of course, extra care would then have to be taken if the template calls were modified.  ''

Mike I be putting this whole section in WT:TSP, but the short answer is first that I concluded last fall this belongs on Meta, and much of our 'good stuff' is already there and many of our best template programmers contribute there as well (Omegatron, CBD, etc.) But here people know me and so this is where it began. Like David, RL called (demanded!) and I went wiki-missing much of last fall, and was busy with mediation stuff when I first returned to having regular time for wiki's, then iterwikitmp-grp hit Tfd... so that boot in the rear restarted things. I'd really rather be working on categorization between here and the commons! Sigh... life is not a selection of first choices, most of the time we're lucky to be able to get one selection in our top fifteen!  I'll address your points on WT:TSP. But thanks for the interest and input. I like that idea of intersister interwiki's! As for 'What I'm doing', the WP:TSP has new revision that may help communicate the focus as I see it. This is really a local need as much as one off in the smaller sister's though Wikispecies and Wikiversity much need template expertise and libraries.  ttfn // nkB "