Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-452-20140917000024/@comment-24473195-20150817102748

I know this is an old topic, but the question is relevant  while   planning to write a particular lua module that converts wikia links to their short form (interwikia link). I saw something similar in wikipedia but it doesn't cover wikia's use case because wikipedia links mainly by language domain.

As such I can find many benefits to this. I'm actually surprised that most  responses here don't cover  some simple reasons:


 * It will immediately detect if a wikia doesn't exist.
 * It will automatically invalidate all links to a non-existent or deleted wikias and redirect them to community central with a useful message.
 * If wikia really wanted to, they could change the color of non-existent interwikias to make them easily identifiable to regular editors. This can also easily be done using js.
 * A misspelled interwikia link is immediately detected by the parser,  redirected, and can help editors to quickly correct them upon preview.
 * Interwiki Language links to particular wikias are also detected (if they exist), and people are redirected to them.
 * Wikimedia's newest beta visual editor can automatically show a preview of files/pages stored in different wikis, e.g. commons:File:Wikipedia.png when they are added using the "media" tool or link dialog. In fact, it automatically changes external links to interwiki links when someone pastes a known link. Wikia is likely to eventually backport this functionality.

These attributes are particularly useful for the module I'm planning to develop or upgrade and some of the rationale given here reinforces my need for such a module. Although in practice they could be handled by simple javascript.