Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:24 UTC
On Wikipedia in any language, attempting to look up with the "Go" button such accurate names and common abbreviations as "ST:TNG", "M:TG" or "Species: The Awakening", among other mostly entertainment-related examples, leads to another Wikimedia project or another language Wikipedia. In a few cases, soft redirects lead to the desired article, but they can't possibly cover all languages. I suggest that namespaces and interlanguage/interwiki links switch to using double colons (e.g. [[wikt::unambiguous]], [[Talk::Main Page]]) to avoid such issues. This change would be simple to implement in MediaWiki, and the necessary conversion would also be simple given a few sed invocations and a list of language and interwiki codes. For consistency, Media and Category links that are to render as normal links should probably also start with double colons.
This would be far too disruptive, changing millions of links for the benefit of a few dozen relatively rare abbreviations.
