Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-452-20140828002814

Does anyone know of any compelling reasons to favour interwiki links over external links?

Does anyone know of any wikis with written policies on the matter? (Preferably with justification, rather than just "Thou shalt use interwiki links at all times", because policies without explanations are silly.)

I've searched, but cannot find anywhere that states a reason why interwiki links should be preferred, or indeed anywhere that states they're preferred at all. The help pages state that they exist, but not why they should be used.

I asked Wikia Staff a while ago, but the response was basically that it was up to the user, and the only suggested reasons for using them were:
 * Hiding external link icons
 * Shorter wikitext

I personally see the absence of external link icons as a disadvantage, and have used CSS to restore them for interwiki links. Since hiding external link icons can be done with CSS anyway, that leaves "Shorter wikitext".

If you already know the exact name of the page you want to link, then it's certainly going to save you time to type Slimer. But if you're copy/pasting a link, it's going to take more time to convert it to an interwiki link. And there certainly seems to be no reason to actively change them after the fact.

Help:Interwiki_link explains how to use them, but lacks any reason why. It mentions "Interwiki links [...] simplify the maintenance of links if a wiki later changes its address.", but redirects are left in this case, so this point is irrelevant on Wikia.

Meta:Help:Interwiki_linking has a "Interwiki versus external" section, but it only lists disadvantages. The fact that it lists disadvantages at all without a single advantage tends to indicate that there are no advantages.

In particular, it notes that Special:LinkSearch doesn't work with interwiki links. (Special:LinkSearch for *.wikia.com currently shows 61673 external wikia links here, btw.)

It has been suggested to me that reducing the number of links on Special:LinkSearch could be seen as an advantage because it makes it easier to monitor. I disagree with that conclusion, as does the documentation. Unlike many other special pages, Special:LinkSearch is not "a list of things to fix", it is there for looking up links, so using interwiki links makes Special:LinkSearch less useful, as I would not be able to search for links to ghostbusters.wikia. (And indeed, interwiki links are missing from that search now.)

This fact has all but convinced me that it's a good idea to start replacing interwiki links with external links on the wikis I frequent, so I'm trying to find reasons I shouldn't. (I'm not planning on "forbidding the use of interwiki links if users want to type them", only "forbidding changing existing external links to interwiki links")

All told, the only reasons I've found for using interwiki links are:
 * They exist
 * The personal convenience of typing fewer characters
 * Shorter wikitext
 * Hiding external link icons
 * Making Special:LinkSearch shorter by making interwiki links impossible to monitor. (normally considered a disadvantage)
 * "All the cool kids use them"

I don't consider any of those to be very convincing.

Don't get me wrong, I love shortcuts - I've made a bunch of shortcut templates to save time for myself and others - but the fact that a shortcut exists doesn't automatically mean it should be compulsory to use it, especially if using said "shortcut" would take longer than the alternative with no other benefit. (Obviously it's a completely different story when the use of a template has other benefits, such as categorisation or DPL listing.)

Can anyone come up with any other reasons to use interwiki links instead of external links?

edit: I think part of the reason why many people default to using interwiki links might be that they look similar to internal links, which are better than external links to the same wiki, so it's ingrained that links starting with "" are better than links starting with just one "[". But the reason for using internal links to the same wiki is so that [[Special:WhatLinksHere works and to keep pages off Special:LonelyPages, which is not the case with interwiki links.

edit: I've also discussed this with two other users who had previously changed external links to interwiki links, and they were also unable to give any good reasons for using them. 