Interwiki link standard

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

An interwiki link standard is the internal link equivalent of a standard wiki URI. It has the following form:

language:service:namespaces_within_service_if_any:page/subpage#section

Under such a standard, links like en:Wikinfo:standard_wiki_URI would work automatically without the end user having to remember or look up an overly complex URI that may be specific to the service or software, omits or assumes language information, and omits or assumes information about the editability of the page, or its effective date. There is no way other than this also to link to a known version of a page, which is particularly important for publications.

It is not presently supported by MediaWiki or GetWiki directly. Typically [ [ en: ] ] points to the Full English Wikipedia, so that en: Metaweb: phyle would point to a nonexistent Metaweb subspace of Wikipedia, not to phyle as it should. The name of the service is assumed to be Wikipedia. This obviously retards the growth of more responsible services.

The vast number of links within the GFDL text corpus, millions of them, mostly assume Wikipedia as the service. This must change to achieve any real management of that corpus beyond that one user interface and clique/cabal. As with lack of a standard wiki URI for non-wiki XML and HTML pages, lack of an interwiki standard inhibits referencing and can only slow growth of the Metaweb.

See en:Wikinfo:standard_wiki_URI for a debate on the issue's relevance to GetWiki development, and en: Recyclopedia: wikitext standard for application issues.

Developers seem to be quite polarized: Wikinfo refuses to discuss this in any context other than GetWiki development, predictably; Recyclopedia, Metaweb, Consumerium, are neutral. Meta-Wikipedia and Wikipedia are only interested in discussing it in the context of Mediawiki, and likely most others don't care. This polarization probably impedes any standard.