Intermap Walking

Automate going from wiki to wiki to wiki to locate a wiki by a short name.

The Problem

Intermap is currently supported on a per-wiki basis. Each wiki needs to maintain its own Intermap. To use other wiki’s Intermap, you have to manually place entries into your own wiki’s Intermap.

And then there is the problem of standards- wikis frequently have different names on different wiki!

“IntermapWalking” is a way to solve the problem in a way similar to, but different than the way the Domain Name System works.

Linking with the Intermap Crawler

Right now, to link with InterMap, you write:

wiki-name:wiki-page

…which resolves wiki-name to the URL prefix for a wiki, and then appends wiki-page.

But with IntermapWalking, you can write:

wiki-name:wiki-page
wiki-name-A|wiki-name-B:wiki-page
wiki-name-A|wiki-name-B|wiki-name-C:wiki-page

The first, wiki-name:wiki-page, is just the normal way that we have right now.

But the next extends it by a “hop.” wiki-name-A|wiki-name-B:wiki-page goes first to wiki-name-A, and retrieves it’s intermap entry for wiki-name-B. Then it goes to wiki-name-B, and requests the page name for wiki-page, which it then goes to.

Effects

If you like a particular wiki’s Intermap, you can “carry” it with you wherever you go, by always referencing from that wiki’s Intermap.

Some wiki would exist solely to maintain large collections of commonly used names.

Some particular fields would want names to mean particular things.

• ComputerScience|Tree:Leaf - visit the computer science wiki (described on the local wiki’s Intermap), find the “tree” wiki, and then find page “leaf” on that wiki.
• Biology|Tree:Leaf - visit the biology wiki (described on the local wiki’s Intermap), find the “tree” wiki, and then find page “leaf” on that wiki.

So, here, we see that there’s a famous site on computer science, that’s been named “ComputerScience” locally, and then we use it to find the “Tree” wiki, and then we use the “Tree” wiki to find a page called “Leaf,” which we are likely to visit now.

But you can also go to the Biology wiki first, then find it’s entry for a wiki called “Tree”, and then find it’s page for “Leaf.”

It is quite likely that there will be several ways to hook into a wiki.

You probably want some way to “lock down” critical wiki, so that people can’t just come in and delete everything there, thus freezing up links on a few million wiki. (See CommunityGovernment.)

Problems

If a wiki in your chain changes it’s intermap, it can throw off your links.

Then again, the same is true with the domain name system: If a second level domain (say, “taoriver.net”) suddenly switches to some other guy, all of your taoriver.net links are broken, too.

Dependencies

• MachineReadablePages or (better) MachineServices

Notes

• Idea first expressed by MarkDilley.
• The idea I expressed is one of using an intermap or a wiki to do this WorldWideWiki:WikiFeaturesWiki:InterMapWalking (or some variation of this)
• How is that different than what is written here? – LionKimbro
• AlexSchroeder tells me Scott of TinyWiki is working on this concept, or something similar to it.
• AlexSchroeder notes that this is similar to the old bang-notation, from before DNS. Something to research.

Page Talk

• the most simplest case is btw using the google: moniker: Google:ErfurtWiki:MarioSalzer
• Actually, that’s not really the case: IntermapWalking is about hopping from intermap to intermap to intermap. Google doesn’t maintain an intermap, so there can’t be any intermap walking through google. – LionKimbro
• True, Google does not technically maintain an intermap.txt file, but it nevertheless can associate interwiki monikers to URLs, even if this happens on heuristic analysis of its database.

Also: The idea does not depend on a global wiki registry- only a local registry. The idea exists so that you don’t have to have a global wiki registry. (Whether it is a good approach or not, is another question.) You hop from wiki to wiki, by IntermapWalking, once you have a local registry on a wiki that implements IntermapWalking. – LionKimbro

Ok, but this idea won’t work until a few of the MajorWikis implement the PublicallyEditableIntermap. (add this to Dependencies?) – anon

Well, no- wait. Why would this depend on PublicallyEditableIntermap?

I think it’d work great with PublicallyEditableIntermap, but I wouldn’t say that it depends on it. – LionKimbro

CategoryFeature CategoryInterWiki CategoryLinking