Editing Help:Interwiki linking (section)

== Interwiki links versus external links ==

Disadvantages of interwiki links:
* The wikitext is less portable across wikis, because wikis do not always have an interwiki prefix for the same sites and even if they do, the prefixes may differ.
* There is no feature to find interwiki links, while searching for an external link can be done with [[Special:Linksearch]]. This is because, while there is an [[mw:Externallinks table|external links table]], there is no such thing for interwiki links. The [[mw:interwiki table|interwiki table]] only stores the interwiki prefixes with their targets as function of the parameter, not the instances of the links. Using the general text search, to search for interwiki links, is more work for the server and therefore, it may be slow, not up-to-date or in busy hours, disabled. See also: [[Help:What links here#Finding external links to a page|Finding external links to a page]].

Comparison:
* <nowiki>[[imdbtitle:0389790|Bee Movie]]</nowiki> gives ''[[imdbtitle:0389790|Bee Movie]]''
* <nowiki>[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0389790 Bee Movie]</nowiki> gives ''[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0389790 Bee Movie]''
** [http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Ftitle%2Ftt0389790 Linksearch] works for the latter only

The applicable CSS classes are "extiw" and "external text". The choice may be governed by this, either way, for uniformity or distinction. An interwiki link is easier to type by itself, but if one goes to the webpage anyways, before putting the link, copying the URL is very convenient. When a template is created, e.g. {{tiw|IMDb title}}, the template can be made, such that it uses an interwiki link and a parameter, like "tt0389790" or "0389790", or that it uses an external link and a parameter like one of those or the full url, if that is more convenient.