Hoi, There have been a lot of angry words about the interwiki links being unavailable by default. Aggressive words like "lynching" have been used. It has been suggested that the availability is against what the Wikimedia Foundation stands for. The fact of the matter is that it is exactly this negative attitude that ensures that many people do not take the Foundation-l and even Meta not serious. Given that many of these people are largely responsible for implementing the strategy of our foundation ensures that the community has lost a lot of influence.
Having said this, the importance of the Interwiki links is highest where there is little information on a subject. There has to be a stub in order for a reader of our project to be redirected by an Interwiki link. This means that the biggest issue with these links is on the smallest Wikipedias. I have entered an idea on the Ideatorrent to have a new keyword, I would call it referral, and on such a page there is only the word with maybe a definition and with the interwiki links on the main page. This will allow people to find their way to articles in other languages. I have asked a few developers and they estimate that it is easy to implement. What would be nice is if in stead of making others the villains of our movement, we would be willing to think outside the box. We exist to bring information to people. So we should concentrate our discussion on how we can grow our traffic. When people consider making the interwiki link hidden by default really problematic, we may depending on resources, study what the difference is. Such a study will cost effort, this is an effort that can not necessarily be expected of the WMF professionals. They are limited in what they spend their time on. NB I find it funny that I defend the XU team because I am a hardcore language diversity defender. I think this is as much because I resent the tone of some as because I am not sure how important this subject actually is. It is not equally important on all Wikipedias and as such I would prefer it to be configurable and leave the decision to its communities. Obviously, the interwiki links show by default when I use Wikipedia. Thanks, GerardM _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l