Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-452-20140917000024/@comment-4142476-20140917150014


 * 1) I generally have the impression that people who use the interwiki format are better acquainted with how the system works, and are therefore usually more careful with what wikis they link to.
 * 2) I have seen before that when people copied from Wikipedia into Wikia, it leaves a mess with all links looking like external links.
 * 3) Following the above, if you would have all interwiki links listed in LinkSearch because you replaced them with external ones, the list would get cluttered with all "proper" interwiki links and the ones that are copypasted or messily inserted.
 * 4) Following that one, it would also clutter your log when you want to for instance check it to people spamming their websites on your wiki, or other external sites (e.g. "watch XY for free here"), or if you want to control the amount of pages on which you want to use non-interwiki external links.
 * 5) A template would be useful if you always link to the same wiki, but if you always use different wikis to link to (which I do for instance on w:c:rp:template:elsewhere), then it will not save you much because  is no shorter than w:c:rp:User:Yatalu.
 * 6) Following the above, interwiki links are also there to make it cleaner and fit in less characters -- a full URL may be quite long. The source code will look quite messy with a lot of external links.
 * 7) You make it sound like wikis aren't allowed to choose their own interwiki map, while they are; there is a standard interwiki map (with both w:c:___ and special ones such as doom:___ or wikipedia:___) which is installed exactly because it may be helpful, but this one can be altered on request by asking Special:Contact/general.