Interwiki link standard

In a wikitext standard, an interwiki link standard refers to articles in wiki form stored in another service. Protocol and editing functions are assumed to be similar, so the interwiki link standard is a bit simpler than the standard wiki URI for linking into a wiki from non-wiki space. It consists only of:

[ [ language:service:namespace_within_service:page/subpage#section ] ]

Note it omits the "http://" protocol and "/wiki/" subprotocol designations as redundant.

Supporting these radically simplifies wiki linking. Because of various uses of abbreviations for services, assumptions about services, etc., it is presently quite confusing. Mediawiki supports a deliberately Wikipedia-centric scheme in which for instance "[ [ en: ] ]" means not "in English" but "in the English Wikipedia". As a result, a reference to "[ [ en: Metaweb: phyle ] ]" will be interpreted incorrectly as a reference to English Wikipedia where there is no article, instead of correctly to English Metaweb 'phyle' where there is one. Mediawiki is likely to continue to resist and retard the development of such a standard for the usual reasons (typically software imperialism - see Wikimedia for discussion of this.) Prove us wrong?

A single standard for at least the GFDL text corpus is highly desirable, and hopefully will be supported in GetWiki_2.0, which will then hopefully displace MediaWiki entirely.

See Wikinfo:interwiki link standard for more on this and integration into GetWiki.