Proposal:Interwiki links for redlinks

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Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

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Summary

Articles currently have interwiki links when other articles on the same topic exist in other Wikipedias. However, when one clicks on a redlink in one's own Wikipedia, if an article by the same title exists on another Wikipedia you will have no way of knowing it. Would it be feasible to have a system that when people click on a redlink, if another Wikipedia has an article on it, a little link could be there, saying "it appears an article by this title exists on the German [or whichever] Wikipedia. Click here to view it"?

Proposal

Set up a system (hereafter the "interwiki redlink system") that when people click on a redlink, if another Wikipedia has an article on it, a little link could be there, saying "it appears an article by this title exists on the German [or whichever] Wikipedia. Click here to view it," much the way a soft redirect to Wiktionary looks.

For example, such a link could appear on this style of search result page, and/or on this style of "you've reached a redlink" page.

Obviously, this would require a bit of doing. I imagine that de novo searches of all Wikipedias would severely tax the servers. It would be better to draw upon the (already existing, like this top 1000 Daily page Hits) lists of the most viewed articles and the list of the most popular search terms and only provide the interwiki redlink system for them. For example, an article on a Dutch actor may have a spike in viewership and come to the attention of the interwiki redlink system. It then does its magic, so that when somebody searches for his name from the English Wikipedia, the link appears notifying them that the Dutch article exists.

If an article exists on more than one other Wikipedia, the interwiki redlink system should chose either the longest one, or the one that gets the most page views. Or the system could just chose the article from whichever of the Wikipedias that has the most articles (typically this would be the English one, followed by the German, etc., unless the article doesn't exist there), which I guess would require less programming.

The number of redlinks that such a system would interwiki in this way would be quite low; most of the top 1000 articles in one language already have equivalents in other languages. But the list would steadily grow, since new articles jump into the daily top 1000 for various reasons, such as a sporting event in the real world.

If successful, expansion by stages to the top 2000/5000/10000/... most popular articles should present few problems.

Motivation

This will motivate people to create articles in their Wikipedias, and reduce frustration somewhat when people know that an article should exist but they can't find it.

Key Questions

Can this be programmed?

Potential Costs

Paying for programming?

References

Inspired by Proposal:Interlanguage reunification

Community Discussion

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