Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:32 UTC
Similar to the RFC and ISBN-handling, we should have ISWC-Numbers implemented in MediaWiki to generate automated links to musical works at e.g. AKM, GEMA SUISA, iswc.org, etc. This suggestion was made by User:Schwijker at the German language edition of Wikipedia, see http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Verbesserungsvorschl%C3%A4ge&oldid=61668205#ISWC
No more magic links in the parser, thanks. What is wrong with using a template?
Agreed, we shouldn't add any more such things. This is what templates are meant for, so that trivial features like this don't have to be implemented in the software proper. RFC and ISBN handling were added before templates, and we only keep them for legacy reasons. (I wanted to remove them, but Brion said "not at this time" when I last asked.)
Templates are fine syntax-wise, but it would be very nice to have it link to a special page that gives a choice of lookup page. We have that for books and for maps now. It would be grate to have it for other stuff too.
(In reply to comment #3) > it would be very nice to have it link to a > special page that gives a choice of lookup page. Agreed. This can and should be had via an extension, then. It is like books, and rfcs, many wikis will never use it. Those should not "suffer" from unnecessary software complexity coming with these specific features.
The special pages for things like BookSources could just as easily be maintained in project space. They're basically just MediaWiki: messages slapped onto a special page, there's no reason they should actually be special pages.
The reason it has to be a special page is simply that you pass an ID as a parameter to it, and that ID is then used to build the target URLs. What I would suggest is a Special page that you give two params, the id and the id's namespace, and it loads the message for that namespace, substitutes the the ID for $1 or whatever, and then displays it. Simple but powerful.
