Thread:Eladkse/@comment-188432-20121029003100/@comment-188432-20121030020332

Thanks for the reply. :) I agree this is a difficult thing from the perspective of the CC admins that have to actually do the button clicking.  At the end of the day, this is an extra little duty, and you guys would clearly prefer it to be as easy and, well, "brainless" as possible.

However, from my perspective it's a minefield that can't be brainless. Doctor Who is popular enough to attract interested parties from around the world, but it also skews young, which means that an awful lot of international wikis get started and die once their founders discover sex. Also, there have been several cases of competing international versions, as with the German and Hebrew versions. There was a very real possibility before tardis stepped in to the DW community that fr.doctorwho might have linked to one German DW site, while we linked to another. Indeed, I'm pretty sure there was a time where one of the international wikis was linked to one Hebrew site, while we were linked to another — but neither Hebrew site had any content! So we've had to develop a policy that at least attempted to find the best non-English partners on Wikia, and then to make sure that all DW sites were linked to the same DW sites in each language. (If that makes any sense.)

So there must be some way for wikis that care about getting better international partners to help CC admins grant linkages with a bit more discretion, but no significant addition of time.

One possible solution would be to create a template called, maybe, local interwiki policies that we could permanently affix to the request page. This template would be a simple, skinny table of no more than maybe 200px width that listed the English parent (or the parent wiki in whatever the native language of the fandom was) and a link to their local interwiki policy. In this way, both requesters and CC administrators would have a "fixed" and permanently visible reference to the relevant local policy.

CC admins would then have both new linkage requests and the list of wikis with local policies on the same page. Instead of having to remember a memo they got six months ago about a particular wiki, they could easily move their eyes from one side of the page to the other. Consider this a little "sticky" that allows those of us who actually care about the quality of the international web we're weaving to constantly remind CC staff of what we're trying to accomplish. More importantly, I think it would also send a signal to requesters that, in some cases, there's both a local and a Wikia standard that must be met.

Finally, it would neatly obviate CC's need to establish much in the way of policy. CC staff would continue to do linkage requests as they come up, except where a policy page on this proposed list said differently. This would therefore encourage local wikis to come up with inter-language link policies and care more about international versions of their wiki.

A worry might be that it would create a whole tapestry of local policies, such that CC admin would have to navigate through a whole variety of local policies. But I really don't think it'll go that way. I think most wikis will continue to not care that much about international versions. Those that step up to the plate will almost undoubtedly keep it simple. The local rules will probably be "Don't create links without our permission". I don't think most people will be asking you to make a value judgement. They'll just be saying, "Let us determine our affiliates, and then we'll submit the list to you."

If you wanted to make it really simple, you could even say that this proposed template could be a list of wikis who require the assent of the local admins before linkage can occur. Then, all CC staff would have to do would be to type the line "You need the permission of before we can make this link."