Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-452-20140917000024/@comment-452-20160820003147

Dessamator wrote:

on the other hand it is  burden of educating new users Thanks for your concern.

While I covered "Changing all of the links is too much work.", I didn't include "educating users" in that, so I've reworded it.

As I previously mentioned, there are also still some people who add external links instead of internal links, which far outnumber people adding interwikia links, so the burden is minimal in comparison.

While I always instruct users to use internal links instead of external links, I only ever leave them a message regarding template:ref or template:w if they are using them often, as covered here: 452 wrote:

If a user adds a new tag to an article, I usually switch it to use the template the next time I edit that article. If a user is adding a lot of tags, I contact them and inform them of the benefits of using the template. The majority of people who add interwikia links are users from other wikis who only edit to add a single link to their wiki and never edit again, so it's not worth contacting them about it.

In fact, I'll check how many times I've had to burden myself... none.

There are no links to template:w from the thread namespace, so in the last two years, I have apparently never felt the need to leave someone a message about using template:w instead of interwikia links.

Dessamator wrote: Also, although it is probably not a concern, Special:linksearch has an internal limit of 10000 pages or so, depending on what wikia set. A great suggestion, however the limit Wikia has set is apparently well over 106,000.

It looks like *.org is the most popular TLD for me, with 10,853 links - so you're correct that it's not a concern for me.

So we will know definitively, I've asked for the exact limit in a support ticket.