Manual talk:Interwiki/Archive 01

Moved from "Help:Interwiki Linking"
This page is too admin-centric. discussion of database tables, etc don't belong in end-user help. Bradleyb 20:54, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Very true. The admin-specific information should be moved to the Manual: namespace. --HappyDog 02:23, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I propose we move this whole page to "Manual:Interwiki". Meanwhile Help:Links has a brief mention of interwiki links. Perhaps this is sufficient for the user help. If we want talk more about interwiki linking from a user perspective, then we could add a larger section on that Help:Links page. -- Harry Wood 13:16, 7 November 2007 (UTC)


 * The move is proposed, and I'll go ahead and do it, unless anyone has any screaming objections.
 * Of course once it's out of the public domain namespace, this server administration information starts to look like unnecessary duplication of meta:Help:Guide to setting up interwiki linking
 * -- Harry Wood 10:41, 7 May 2008 (UTC)


 * OK The move is done (It used to be at Help:Interwiki linking)
 * I've morrored the same move on all of the translated versions of this page, and dropped the link from the Help:Contents page (also in all the translations), Help:Copying (and all the translations) ... hence the sudden swamping of recent changes!  And that's before I even look at Special:WhatLinksHere/Help:Interwiki linking. Quite a lot of link fixing still to do. Sorry for the turmoil, but these things need to be done. -- Harry Wood 14:13, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Interlinking won't work
Unfortunately, when using Main Page, the page won't link to Wikipedia's main page when typing it in my own wiki. What am I doing wrong? --87.69.58.71 10:23, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


 * interwiki links will not update until page is previewed or saved. If in doubt, just drop the interwiki table and import your new version

Why No wikipedia: By Default?
Is the Wikipedia: links excluded from the default list for a reason? (Or is it just out of date?) --82.71.113.222 08:21, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

--82.76.35.13 10:16, 20 August 2006 (UTC) Why is wikipedia out of default links?


 * Why is wikipedia out of default links? --87.160.235.194 09:53, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/maintenance/interwiki.sql The Wikipedia InterWiki prefix is in the trunk now (but I'm not sure if it's still missing from the latest build). -Kakurady 17:15, 31 October 2007 (UTC)


 * If someone could confirm exactly which version of MediaWiki includes wikipedia by default, that'd be good
 * ...but in the meantime I'm assuming that this is fixed, and changing the page (and tidying away commnents on the page) to reflect that.
 * This meant I needed to put a different example (kayakwiki) in the 'Adding a new website for interwiki linking' section.
 * -- Harry Wood 12:49, 3 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Looks like it was added in 1.10 -Steve Sanbeg 19:30, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Its too difficult
to set db table for interwiki operation. Am I computer technician?.....oops..


 * I agree. I can do it.  But this kind of thing should be administrable via an admin special page.  Not all wiki administrators will have access to the database or be comfortable accessing their database.  Even I find it a bit of a pain to tell the truth. --82.32.214.15 23:39, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Ugly Links
I think that's what it was called. My website requires I have "index.php?title=Main_Page" for instance. Does this affect interwiki linking? I ask because I can't get ANY of the listed ones to work on my Wiki. --Rezanow 08:31, 12 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Ok, nearly a month later, still busting my butt to get these to work. Just tried to get a mw: link to work and it still doesn't.  I've checked the database table, the entries are there.  Is there something else I could check out?
 * --Rezanow 05:43, 8 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I can't get them to work either. I'm using MediaWiki 1.9.3 with PHP 5.2.1. Whenever I try to include an external template, I get an error messge that looks like this:
 * [Template fetch failed for w:en:Template:User_en?action=render; sorry]
 * - Big Brother 1984 08:02, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
 * See Manual talk:$wgEnableScaryTranscluding -- Big Brother 1984 08:35, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Hiding the interwiki name?
I'm trying to set up the interwiki links to not show the interwiki name in the text.

For example, if I want to create an interwiki like to the wiki article on wikipedia, and I enter wiki it shows up as wiki. As you can imagine, if I want to use a lot of interwiki links in a sentence, to articles that may be of interest to the reader, but of which are not relevant enough to the subject of my site to justify us adding our own article, it would be nice to just interwiki to wikipedia or some other site. However, I would want them to show up like wiki and not wiki. At most a little icon representing the interwiki site to indicate the article is not local, but not text that makes my articles look unreadable. Any ideas? --82.32.214.15 22:24, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
 * You can always append a vertical pipe at the end of the URL. Type wikipedia:wiki to obtain wiki. Titoxd (?!?) 06:39, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
 * That's tiresome to type vertical pipes everywhere. I have come up with a simple hack that is to create a template named "w" with this content: now you just need to type  when you want to make a link to wikipedia. Sweet huh ?

Not a clear note, this...
''Note: In some installations none of these are pre-installed. Try Main Page in this case.''

The above should at a very minimum suggest what this is supposed to accomplish. -- Cimon Avaro 03:39, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Can this work with 'offsite searches' for example Google?
if I set iw_prefix="g" and iw_url="http://www.google.com/search?q=$1" will this work? or will it do the stinking http://www.google.com/search?q= error? (What we want is http://www.google.com/search?q=) - Not that it makes a difference in this case, but in general the former is wrong.


 * gives, but
 * gives


 * Patrick 23:29, 3 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, using a template (nested or not) in a link causes the pipe trick:  pagename  -> pagename


 * ...to not work:   ->


 * :/ Is there a way to force certain interwiki (despite Google not being a wiki) links to automatically encode links to them? -Eep² 11:43, 2 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Also, how do I get a space in an interwiki link to actually be a space and not turned into an underscore (_) or plus (+)? -Eep² 11:48, 2 August 2007 (UTC)


 * see here: --87.194.248.18 12:40, 5 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Magic words retain underscores... -Eep² 13:12, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

how do you put an interwiki link in the sidebar?
i am trying to put an interwiki link in my menu. Bouncingmolar 22:29, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Read Manual:Guide_to_setting_up_interwiki_linking. You have to add in  your prefix, normally only language codes are in the sidebar. --212.117.123.107 10:36, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Proposed Alternative For Defining Interwikis
I think editing DB tables to add or change available interwikis is unreasonable. I propose an alternative that follows the model of MediaWiki redirect links.

To create an Interwiki link, create a page in your wiki with the name you want to use in your links. For example, let's say we want to link to pages in a wiki at NASA. We want to use the keyword "nasa" in our interwiki links. So we create a page called "nasa" in our wiki.

On the new "nasa" page, we use the new "INTERWIKI" directive that I propose. The parameter would be the base URL of the other wiki. In this case, let's assume NASA has a wiki at  http://www.nasa.gov/wiki/ . The directive would look like this:

 #INTERWIKI url=http://www.nasa.gov/wiki/$1 local=0 trans=1 

Where the parameters correspond to the iw_url, iw_local, and iw_trans columns of the interwiki</tt> table in the DB. I would say that local</tt> and trans</tt> could be optional parameters, defaulting to zero if they are not specified.

After that, any links in our wiki like  nasa:satellites </tt> would link to the "satellites" page in the NASA wiki,  http://www.nasa.gov/wiki/satellites </tt>.

To help manage these interwiki links, there could be a special page that lists all pages in the wiki that are interwiki definitions like this.

--Lsloan 20:03, 17 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Or just have a decent special page to manage the entries in the first place. 86.133.208.191 20:30, 1 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Do you mean, a special page that lists interwiki links and lets the user (admin) add, modify, or delete them in the DB? Are there examples of other special pages that facilitate admin functions like this?  --Lsloan 13:55, 2 August 2007 (UTC)


 * There are already at least 2 interwiki extensions that do this (if you find more, please categorize them appropriately). -Eep² 21:55, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Database Blob
Hi,

I'm using phpMyAdmin to modify the interwiki table.

The question is that the url is a binary blob.

How can I see and modify this blob with phpMyAdmin for example.

Thanks 82.246.25.153 13:33, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

see here

In PhpMyAdmin
The following will display your interwiki links:

Plain Text
The iw_prefix is a plaintext, if the cell is Blob you should save the value of iw_prefix in a .TXT PLAIN File (Be careful to save it in ANSI and not UNICODE or UTF-8) and select that file to upload to the Phpmyadmin

--Hsilamot 08:12, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Database-table-changing
I think, that the developers changed somthing in the interwiki-table. I can remember that I could edit interwikilinks in earlier versions.

But I dont know, how I can handle the format "binary blob" for changing interwiki-links. Any hints?

The link given above is not helpfull. --Antropositiv 15:04, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Default interwikis
The list of defaults seems to be much longer than the list on this page. A lot of them are of questionable origin, as well. Makes me wonder how they got to be defaults. 24.6.88.7 14:20, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/maintenance/interwiki.sql --Kakurady 17:13, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

language interwiki link doesn't work with namespaces
i use namespaces, when i am in th e main namespace the language interwiki link create a ling in the language menu on the left. But whren I am in a namespace let's say the namespace "processes", the language interwiki link doesn't in the menu on the left but on the page

so My_Page works well but fr:Processes:My_Page doesn't work

Redirecting to another wiki?
I added an interwiki link following the instructions on this page, and tried to redirect using it here. Is it possible to make MediaWiki redirect over interwiki links?

Binary BLOB
If BLOB is defined as Binary large object, is "binary BLOB" redundant?
 * Ha, ha. The poster wrote "blob", not "BLOB" or "BLOb". -- Thnidu 19:17, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

"mw" & "meta" missing from v1.11.0? and 1.12?
I finished installing v1.11.0 and see that both the "mw" and "meta" prefixes are missing from the interwiki table. I suppose that drop was done on purpose? --Michael Schmarck 11:04, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

The same with 1.12, apparently. All other interwiki links of this chart seem correct nonetheless. --NewMorning 23:13, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Still the same in 1.13. 'mw' seems to be replaced with 'mediawikiwiki' for some reason. I think the manual should be adjusted. --Joris 12:38, 29 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I have made a change to the manual to indicate that mediawikiwiki does not work (at least from wikipedia) and to use the prefix mw instead. My revision is in the draft version. I hope that someone will make this information visible to end users as it is somewhat frustrating when a manual gives incorrect information. -84user 14:45, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

They appear to still be missing from current versions of MediaWiki (i.e. 1.15.2). However, there is "mediawikiwiki," "metawiki," and "metawikipedia." I can understand not including meta as a prefix in non-Wikimedia wikis, but shouldn't mw be a standard prefix for MediaWiki? Tisane 11:32, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Never mind, I see it's added in v1.16. Tisane 11:34, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Transcluding templates doesn't seem to work as intended
If, for example I try to transclude a template from Wikipedia, it copies in the entire source (even the stuff that is noinclude) rather than performing a proper transclude.


 * I too have noticed this. Whenever I try to transclude a template, variables don't work and and don't work either. It would seem that interwiki transclusion is more like an than real transclusion.Shawn D.

Template:Note doesn't seem to work in fresh Mediawiki Installs
I've imported the User Help into my fresh MediaWiki install and it appears the template:note doesn't seem to work (I also imported that page and the bublgraph.png). I tried to modify it but I don't have the necessary MW coding skills. I also included this comment on the Template:Note Discussion page. --Crios 17:13, 21 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Well to save you the hassle of fixing that problem...  just delete 'Help:Interwiki linking' page from your wiki, because none of this information belongs in these help pages anyway (especially not all the technical notes)  See above:   -- Harry Wood 14:15, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Interwiki section
Interwikis should be displayed by three of its letters (unknown) or with a language name but the hide and show section. When it is hidden, the Interwikis are not seen, when the pointer clicks on "show", the interwikis appear, some of them are below the page and some to be hidden, only to be shown after clicking on "show". Pumpie 02:06, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Getting interwiki links when I don't want them!
The colon syntax for category links is the same as the syntax for interwiki links. According to the, Interwiki links are distinguished by beginning with a colon, like this:
 * PCR Interwiki link</tt>

as opposed to
 * Add cat to article</tt>

... but the same card also gives
 * : Category:CatName Link to cat</tt>

A link using the syntax, with a category prefix that just happens to be the same as a prefix in the Interwiki table, will go to the other wiki. This interferes unpredictably with category creation by making it impossible to use colon syntax with that category prefix in any wiki. (See MediaWiki Users Forum.)

I see that there are interwiki extensions. I hope one of them will fix this problem without creating too many new ones. The interwiki syntax should never have used the colon syntax in the first place.

Thnidu 20:00, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Hooks for interwiki links
(Sorry if this is the wrong section of the wiki for this) Does anyone know if there are any hooks related to Inter-language links? Bud0011 02:32, 22 September 2010 (UTC).