Assigning to Rob. I don't think this is high priority, but see http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Interwiki_link/technical for how they do it (only the result, not the technical background; Meta would be the equivalent of [[CentralWikia:]]).

Unassigned from Rob, before changing configuration you need to have this feature actually working. Currently, interwikis don't support $2, furthermore, interwiki link syntax has no place for it. How do you imagine such a syntax?

Ow, and how it's better than our current practice of interwiki chaining, e.g. [[b:ru:foo]]?

(In reply to comment #0)

http://$1.wikimedia.org/wiki/$2

so it could be used for all wikimania's, stats, and other wikimedia projects.

Including /wiki/ in path makes links to stats stuff meaningless unless you use [[c:stats:../wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm]].

(In reply to comment #2)

Unassigned from Rob, before changing configuration you need to have this
feature actually working. Currently, interwikis don't support $2, furthermore,
interwiki link syntax has no place for it. How do you imagine such a syntax?

One possible solution is to set [[c: ]] to a special http://redirector.wikimedia.org/iw/$1 location and use PHP scripts, rewrite rules etc to do a redirect.

Is there some reason why we'd want this?

The reason would be to enable links like [[wm:wikimania2012:Foobar]] without the need for a change in the Interwiki map like adding 'wm2012' for example.

Just like [[b:simple:Foobar]] is possible now aswell.

The 'Meta' central example that is briefly described above may be even better, not sure.
It does may a little sense to reference to those subdomains as $1.

ie.
[[s:]] -> www.wikisource.org
[[s:de]] -> de.wikisource.org
[[m:]] -> meta.wikimedia.org
[[m:wikimania2012:Test]] -> wikimania2012.wikimedia.org

But I guess that would 1) break the convention that $1 is always a language. However, if it would be configured like wikibooks (ie. subdomain doesn't have to exist).

for example [[b:ab:Foobar]] links to "Wiki does not exist", that system might be usable for Meta/Wikimedia-domain aswell to have [[wm:XXX:Foobar]] link to XXX.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foobar

ashley> I don't know what you mean, but I just wanted to say that it's possible -- we at ShoutWiki do s:w:subdomain:Page name redirects via a similar setup; you might be interested in ShoutWiki's configuration files (available at http://www.shoutwiki.com/conf/)

(After a question on how to handle the humongous plethora of wmflabs.org subdomains.)

Perhaps the easiest way would be to set up a redirector on a Wikimedia server (or Tool Labs), since it seems you are reluctant to add a $2 parameter.

I strongly recommend against adding more interwikis and making them even more complicated -- templates should be able to do this sort of job more flexibly.

(In reply to comment #11)

I strongly recommend against adding more interwikis and making them even more
complicated -- templates should be able to do this sort of job more flexibly.

One advantage of interwikis is that they work in edit summaries.

(In reply to comment #11)

I strongly recommend against adding more interwikis and making them even more
complicated -- templates should be able to do this sort of job more flexibly.

Thanks Brion for chiming in! I personally am a fan of interwikis, but I think the correct status for this bug is now WONTFIX given your opinion and Tim's skepticism at comment 6.

To be honest, one could argue that, as we keep adding new interwikis to the interwiki map for many subdomains, a generic interwiki would not be harder to use than the current situation; but it would surely be an additional degree of complexity.