Manual talk:Interwiki/LQT Archive 1

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)

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 (Or is it just out of date?)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)

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)

Too admin-centric
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)

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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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)

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)

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 table in the DB. I would say that local 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)