Do you have an Mw namespace? Or is mw missing from your interwiki list?

I have a MediaWiki namespace, but no MW one.

Following the instructions in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interwiki if I run https://XXXX.ca/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=interwikimap I only see 4, and get another redlink to a [[mw: . And that then reminds me that years ago I probably purged the interwikis because there were 4 that I wanted and the rest had nothing to do with how we use our wiki. Does this mean I have to set up a interwiki link to the mediawiki wiki to fix interface error message links? If so, it would probably be good to add to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interwiki a hint that messing with some interwikis can break your wiki?

I understand why to abstract the links, but is it a good idea to do it with a prefix that isn't somehow protected?

I think it makes more sense to not use an interwiki syntax that can be changed/similar by third party wikis.

It should be a proper external URL so you're not relying on functionality that isn't guaranteed to exist on a third party wiki.

Will this ticket reach the people who would make such decisions about how these links are set up inside interface pages? Or do I need to do something else to flag this?

Because the comment is more widespread. The API link (https://XXXX.ca/index.php?title=Mw:API&action=edit&redlink=1) to show me which interwikis there are also had its own redlinked [[mw: entry, so this might be a common practice.

For wikis in this situation I recommend simply updating the page [[ MediaWiki:prefs-vector-enable-vector-1-help ]] to reflect better text, or hiding the preference or text altogether.

We could update the i18n messages to use an external link, but that's a lot of messages to updating. This code is also temporary and might be removed/configurable soon: (T274267)

Adding interwiki tag in case there is some better way for us to resolve the use of interwikis across our projects. Perhaps mw: should be added by default?

For solution for anyone else who runs into this: running the following sql query to add the mw interwiki back in solved the direct problem for me:

INSERT INTO `mw_interwiki` (iw_prefix, iw_url, iw_local, iw_trans) VALUES ("mw", "https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/$1", 0, 0)

But a better solution is likely needed for the underlying problem of many user interface pages linking via interwiki. That setup is easy to break inadvertently when cleaning out a table that contains a lot of legacy interwikis. Some don't even exist any longer (eg http://www.advogato.org) and the process by which sites are added or removed from the list is not addressed in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interwiki. That problem is probably out of the scope of this ticket, but if all the interwikis that are included by default were MWF wikis I likely wouldn't have cleaned it out.

There mostly isn't a process.

Even if they're updated in the canonical list inside MW core, MW doesn't update/re-integrate that (and hence doesn't add/remove/update rows). It's only used at install point.

If they're definitely dead, bugs filed or gerrit patches would be accepted to remove them.

See also: T273080: Stop managing both interwiki.list and interwiki.sql