Monday, August 22, 2011

Making an app out of interwiki links

When a #Wikipedia title like ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟ cannot be typed on your mobile phone, what do you do? You type it the way you can type the title and rely on interwiki links to display the article to your mobile phone.

The idea is simple and elegant and, it has been implemented with the Oriya Wikipedia in mind. It looks like this:

 
and it will send you to the Oriya Internet article.  The application is created for Oriya however, it does allow for other languages as well. Just replace the or with the language code of another Wikipedia.

There are all kinds of possibilities with such an application. When it is integrated with the Babel extension, it could provide an article when the article does not exist in the requested language. 

Srikanth Lakshmanan created a really nice program that deserves a much wider application.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2 comments:

LOGIC said...

Thanks much.

The app is generic, You can use any language code. Oriya was just as an example to sent the list.

There is a need for an inside solution from mediawiki, the problem currently being the interwiki links are not stored in structured format in db since pages are deleted,moved.

I have implemented it for Tamil on the tawp.in domain. tawp.in/en/Internet works and its also somewhat short. :)

Next up transliterated URLs and then finally the search solution should be modified to include these, so a language wikipedia user, need not even type in local language(Not all may be confident with spellings) but can access content through search.

LOGIC said...

http://interwikiredir.appspot.com/ - Minimal documentation :)