Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-452-20140917000024/@comment-24473195-20160819141630

Just came across this again.

If I convert all interwiki Wikia links to external links, I can search Special:LinkSearch for those links. Can anyone think of any actual downsides to not using interwikia links? Yes, doing so prevents you from doing more powerful searches using the API:
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Iwbacklinks
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Iwlinks

As such as far as I can see, the only advantage that Special:Linksearch has over it is that it can use wildcards, and has a proper interface (special page) do so so. Creating a simple userscript using iwbacklinks that allows wildcards is also possible with moderate effort. "Does anyone know of any reasons to favour inter-Wikia links over external links to other Wikia wikis?"

So really it comes down to validity, reliability, usability (newer tools like VE automatically help convert them automatically).

The only benefit left is that linksearch doesn't need any extra effort aside from using a specific template. Which means either building a bot to enforce it, using abusefilter or going around edit-warring or manually editing it whenever someone adds a "normal" interwiki link.