Talk:Interwiki map/Archives/2010-08

Latest comment: 13 years ago by Abigor in topic Proposed removals

Proposed additions

PowerSupplyWiki.com

powersupplywiki.com fulfills all six requirements as well. It's a free-content power supply encyclopedia. Please add!



--A. B. (talk) 04:11, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
The question I would have about this in general is how many pages on Wikipedia could need a link to a power supply wiki, other than the power supply article? --75.84.193.237 00:24, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Peterphile.info

  • Wiki format: peter:
  • Interwiki link: http://peterphile.info/pan/$1
  • Statistics: [2]
  • Cross-wiki Link search: [3]
  • Reasons: Peterphile is an encyclopedia about subjects related to Peter Pan and J. M. Barrie. It was begun with some WP content as a base, developing into a more comprehensive resource than WP's policies of neutrality and notability allow (like Bulbapedia), and with its more liberal interpretation of Fair Use for images, it siphons off such cruft to a more appropriate site. More than half of its articles are original to the site. As for the interwiki mapping guidelines:
  1. The site offloads trivia, and its articles supplement WP's NOTE/NOR/NPOV content about the subject.
  2. I'm the admin and I've been a responsible contributor to WP articles on these (and other) subjects for years.
  3. The site is CC-BY-SA.
  4. The site runs Mediawiki, lightly modded. After laying the foundation myself, I've opened it up to other editors.
  5. The site has 500+ articles and 1000+ images, growing daily.
  6. No, no malware.

-JasonAQuest 22:43, 29 January 2010 (UTC)



--A. B. (talk) 04:11, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
I have several concerns:
  1. It appears that virtually all the of the <30 existing links in en.wikipedia were added by yourself.[4] That's OK, but it means that essentially it's a personally maintained and written site -- one person's opinion. It probably does not meet the requirements for linking to wikis in en.wikipedia's External Links Guideline (see "Links normally to be avoided," #12).
  2. Almost all of the links added to en.wikipedia have been added by yourself. The others appear to have been vandalism reversions. See en.wikipedia's Conflict of Interest Guideline.
  3. Many of these link additions are being used as references.[5][6][7] They probably do not meet en.wikipedia's Reliable Sources Guideline (see "Self-published sources (online and paper)"), Verifiability Policy or its No Original Research Policy
  4. One we add a wiki to the Interwiki Map, it becomes almost impossible to track link additions, so addition to the Interwiki map calls for an unsually high degree of trust, certainty and consensus.
I recommend against adding this wiki to the Interwiki map. --A. B. (talk) 13:00, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
I can understand that the site may not qualify as a Reliable Source for citations, but does that have a bearing on its suitability for interwiki linking? The only times I've done it were when I couldn't find online sources, figuring that a weak reference was better than none. -JasonAQuest 17:19, 6 April 2010 (UTC)


Arborwiki

Arborwiki fulfills all six requirements above. It is a city wiki that anyone can edit, similar to Wikipedia, that focuses on information about the Ann Arbor, MI area. Edward Vielmetti, 12:57 AM, 16 Dec 2009 (EST)



--A. B. (talk) 04:11, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
Comments:
  • Arborwiki is a community project with support initially from local schools and presently from the local library.[8]
  • About half the recent changes to Arborwiki have been made by the requester.[9] The requestor is not one of the site's 4 admins.[10]
  • The requestor has added multiple links, but so have other editors: w:en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam/LinkReports/arborwiki.org
--A. B. (talk) 13:12, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
According to this summary, it sounds like a good site to add. --75.84.193.237 00:24, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Gardenology.org

Gardenology.org fulfills all six requirements as well. It's a free-content plant encyclopedia with 15,921 articles. Please add! --Wixi 02:17, 19 December 2009 (UTC)



--A. B. (talk) 04:11, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
I don't have time now to analyze this wiki but here are some links for others to look at:
--A. B. (talk) 13:21, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
  1. The recent changes on the site has a lot of new pages/edits which are referenced to a Horticultural Encyclopedia.
  2. Many of the English Wikipedia links, especially in the last few months are attribution links for the use of the creative commons text from the site, by a Wikipedia user that is transferring content to Wikipedia. There are some links in other language Wikipedias as well as the English Wikipedia by registered and non-registered users.
  3. The site is Creative Commons (by, sa).
  4. The w:en:Gardenology.org article shows references from Christian Science Monitor blog and the Discovery Company's Planet Green.

--75.84.193.237 00:24, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I think Gardenology is a worthy wiki to connect with, since it has almost 20,000 pages, and the contents of a 3,500 page plant/horticulture encyclopedia (by Liberty H. Bailey). I recommend adding. --Wixi 17:19, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Flickr Photos

There's a FlickrUser link, why no FlickrPhoto link? The syntax would look something like:

 FlickrPhoto http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=$1

and used it would look like: [[FlickrPhoto:2967354314|Jujyfruit]] --Eli the Bearded 01:08, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

WikiWeet.nl

WikiWeet is a wiki (encyclopedia) in dutch for children/teens (age 8-15). I would like to have this wiki added to the interwiki-list.



Sumurai8 13:38, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Jira

I think JIRA needs a interwiki map(Pattern:[https://jira.toolserver.org/browse/$1])I hope you think same!Amir 10:24, 7 June 2010 (UTC)



Amir 10:24, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
Maybe ts-jira/jira-ts/jira-tools/etc. would be better? Cbrown1023 talk 14:31, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
It's not bad idea but we haven't another jira wiki thus I think doesn't need disambiguation Amir 01:00, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

WikiSkripta.eu

WikiSkripta is a Czech wiki project run by all medical faculties in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, being the second most active wiki in the Czech Republic right after the Czech Wikipedia. It fullfills all the six requirements stated above. Its interwiki link would be most useful to the Czech Wikipedia, that has started to cite/use much of its content recently, however, other Czech wiki projects may use it as well. Its content is free (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Czech Republic). (It has a sister project in English called wikilectures.eu created for English medical students in the Czech Republic, that has, alas, not yet enough content as the czech one.)



--Pavel Dusek 09:21, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Open Library

The Open Library fulfills all six requirements above. It is an library that anyone can edit whose goal is to have a page for every book. The Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive.



I propose "openlibrary" as a prefix.
The URL format is http://openlibrary.org/$1
Templates for linking from wikipedia are OL_author and OL_work
Arielbackenroth 23:33, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Proposed removals

wikitravel.org



The owner of this website, w:Internet Brands, was caught spamming Wikipedia for over three years. See w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam/Internet Brands and w:WT:WPSPAM#Internet Brands spam on Wikipedia. MER-C 08:40, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't know what the owner of the site might have done, but I know Wikitravel. It's a textbook example of what interwiki linking is for, a fellow open-content wiki that provides a great supplement to WP by providing the kinds of travel info that doesn't belong here, which people researching locations will likely find useful. It's linked from countless articles on WP not because the site's corporate sponsor has spammed it, but because those links are useful. The company that "bought" Wikitravel actually has almost nothing to do with the content of site; they just host it and get the money from Google ads on the site. (Not that different in effect from Wikia and the sites it hosts.) Don't take a machine gun to Wikipedia's links sections just to punish Wikitravel's corporate sponsor. -68.76.16.14 18:24, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
I have to agree with the anonymous user here. Cbrown1023 talk 18:52, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
This is a very widely used and quite useful interwiki link. No reason to punish Wikitravel's editors and readers due to the alleged actions of the company that owns the servers. Full disclosure: I am both an admin on the English Wikitravel and a long-time English Wikipedia editor. LtPowers 19:10, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

We have no way to stop or even track uncontrolled addition of external links using the Interwiki map. Addition to the map requires a special measure of trust; WikiTravel's owners (or their agents) have massively and persistently spammed links to their other sites using single purpose accounts in spite of requests and warnings to stop. They may or may not have done the same with WikiTravel -- we have no way to tell.

At the same time, WikiTravel's use on Wikipedia projects pre-dates its purchase by the current owner. Furthermore, WikiTravel hosts good content for many places. I would guess that the preponderance of interlinks to WikiTravel were added in good faith by editors with no connection to the owner.

I strongly believe we must remove WikiTravel from the Interwiki map while still allowing editors to add their links. This way, we can monitor and control as necessary the addition of these links. Unfortunately, the minute we remove wikitravel.org from the map, 100s or 1000s of links go bad so I suggest the following:

  1. Someone develop and deploy a bot to convert WikiTravel interwiki links to external links.
  2. Remove WikiTravel from the Interwiki map.

--A. B. (talk) 21:38, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Let's not do that just yet... since I'm not seeing any agreement to remove it from the Interwiki map in the first place. Cbrown1023 talk 21:59, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
A.B.'s claims seem a bit extreme. The vast, vast majority of those links, if not all of them, use wikipedia:Template:Wikitravel, providing an easy and convenient way to track its usage. (Looks to be on the order of a few thousand at the moment.) I don't see how external links are any easier to track than interwiki links, anyway. LtPowers 22:11, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Response:
  1. I don't think my comments are "extreme"; I wish they were. If you review the spam reports, Internet Brands' abuse of Wikipedia has been massive -- probably one of the biggest spam efforts in the last several years. I'm basing this on my experience as one of the 3 or 4 admins most involved with spam clean-up on en.wikipedia and here at Meta-Wiki.
  2. If I understand Interwiki linking correctly, you don't have to use a template. In that case, we can't even find non-templated interwiki links without developing some sort of new bot or filter. The same applies to links added with templates that were "substituted" (see Help:Substitution for more on substitution).
  3. External links can be found using the Special:LinkSearch page.
  4. With some effort, we have bots (such as COIBot) that track and record (imperfectly) external link additions, including who's adding them. This makes it possible to distinguish between innocent link additions by regular editors and spamming by single purpose accounts.
  5. Even with templated interwiki links, finding out who added them requires a laborious search of each individual page's edit history.
  6. Several thousand links is a lot of links.
If you see an alternate way to prevent Internet Brands abusing Wikimedia projects with Wikitravel links, I'm very interested. We certainly know they've been very aggressive with some of their other properties and we're flying blind with regards to their behaviour with Wikitravel links.
I don't know why Internet Brands has chosen the path they did; it was certainly pointed out to them they were making a big mistake. Hopefully we can find a way to continue to use Wikitravel in spite of their abuse.
--A. B. (talk) 22:52, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Interwiki links aren't marked nofollow, too (compare google:test to [12] by viewing the HTML source of this page). The idea is to continue linking to Wikitravel but to hit the Internet Brands spammers where it hurts -- their PageRank. MER-C 04:23, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
In other words, you aren't trying to fix an actual problem (inappropriate links to wikitravel.org, which there is no evidence of), but to punish someone somehow. Even if it harms a legitimate, useful open-content project that wasn't involved in any wrongdoing, by reducing its search profile. -99.27.174.39 11:25, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Any final decision here on interwiki map removals will be based on what's best for Wikimedia's projects, not punishing a spammer. All our regular external links are marked "nofollow" to reduce the incentive to spam Wikipedia (sadly we still get a lot of spam anyway but nofollow implementation has definitely helped). Our software treats interwiki links as a trusted internal link so they don't carry the nofollow attribute. Wikipedia links without a nofollow attribute are worth their weight in gold in the search engine optimization world, giving any spammer a powerful incentive to spam them if they can get them on the interwiki map.
This is all about who controls Wikimedia's content and to what end -- our neutral, volunteer editors on behalf of our readers, or some external entity on behalf of its shareholders. Wikitravel's removal from the Interwiki map would not eliminate linking to Wikitravel -- just make it more transparent as to who's adding the links and to which articles. The links to spam tracking pages provided by MER-C document that Internet Brands has been very persistent and sneaky about spamming its other domains.
We did not create this situation nor did Wikitravel's community of volunteer editors -- Internet Brands made a deliberate choice to abuse Wikimedia web sites that has led us to this juncture.--A. B. (talk) 12:50, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Interlinks can be tracked using en:Special:AbuseFilter. Ruslik 11:47, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, Ruslik0. I'll have to scratch my head and figure Abuse Filter out.
There's also a discussion underway on Wikitravel worth following:
--A. B. (talk) 13:30, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
As a regular reader of wikipedia and a casual contributor to wikitravel I absolutely support any measures helping the admins to check on manipulation. Until now though I fail to see the problem involving wikitravel: All content on wikitravel - that is all sites that can be linked to via interwiki-links, as far as I understand - is written, edited and checked by volunteers who are not associated and more often than not arguing with the owner of the domain and servers "Internet Brands". The system is actually rather similar to the one of wikipedia. I don't know of any biased page on wikitravel so far. --59.97.152.18 15:55, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
I'm just about to go (due to how wikipedia bends over to accomodate such a blatant PR scheme's articles and how they have no checks and balances to prevent biased articles about political subjects being controlled by supportrs) but I thought I should at least leave this, I found it yesterday:
wikitravel.org/shared/Talk:Advertising_policy#New_Monetization_Effort - whatever they actually have on the site, they are earning money from links to it due to advertising and affiliate links and such, and they are looking to make it more commerce centric in the future seems. --Kittins floating in the sky yay 16:44, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
People disagreeing with you is not "bending over to accommodate" spammers. Anyway, yes, Wikitravel is a commercial website. It is not owned by a not-for-profit organization. Neither is any Wikia wiki, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for you. LtPowers 17:20, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
For what it's worth, ads on a website do not prevent our linking to it if that will benefit our readers; think of all our links to the The New York Times or The Economist, for instance. Having said that, a non-commercial site is probably a more appealing link, all else being equal. I read the exchange about increasing Wikitravel revenues -- thanks for pointing it out. Personally, I hope the Wikitravel community can sort out these internal issues since I enjoy using their site. --A. B. (talk) 17:50, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

@Ruslik0 The abuse filter is useless against cross-wiki spam, which I'm hoping this is not.
But, yeah, if you guys fork the project (which is probably a good idea at this point) then I would support the new domain being on the interwiki map. There is a lot more scrutiny on Wikia because of the unique relation between us and them. MER-C 13:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

world66.com

For the sake of consistency if nothing else, you should also be proposing to remove world66.com from the Interwiki map. That site is owned by Internet Brands and, unlike the generally excellent Wikitravel.org, it is a very dubious looking site with poor content.--202.169.242.124 16:00, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for flagging this additional Internet Brands domain on the Interwiki map. Yes, we should remove it as well, I think. --A. B. (talk) 16:35, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Requests for updates

Troubleshooting

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