Discussione:Pasquale Villani

Another Pasquale Villani

Ciao! I thought it might be interesting to some of you, that the English Wikipedia has an article on another person named Pasquale Villani born in Nocera Inferiore. He was an American computer programmer of Italian descent, an author and advocate of free software, best known as the original author of the FreeDOS kernel. He was born on 18 April 1954 in Nocera Inferiore and died on 27 August 2011 in Freehold Township, New Jersey, USA.

I don't know, if these two individuals were in any way related.

While the FreeDOS Pasquale Villani is discussed in an article named "Pat Villani" in the English WP, there is also a redirection page from "Pascale Villani" to the "en:Pat Villani" article. Normally, this would cause interwiki bots to cross-link the two unrelated articles. Therefore I added a hidden special syntax comment to each of the two pages, which is read by interwiki bots and tells them "do not attempt to cross-link to this page".

--Matthiaspaul (msg) 16:02, 26 nov 2011 (CET)

Hi. This Pasquali Villani is a very important italian historian. Therefore the redirect (interwiki) can not be put to a different person, like the one at which you are commenting on. Thank you if you want to correct the error on the En wiki.--Almadannata (msg) 16:31, 26 nov 2011 (CET)

Yes. As odd as it may seem, this "strange" comment I put in will ensure exactly this. Whenever an inter-wiki bot (based on the Pywikipedia/interwiki.py framework) is about to add an inter-wiki link, it will first check, if the link to be inserted already exists inside a <!-- HTML comment -->. If this happens to be the case, the bot will assume that the link has been put into a comment for a reason (because there's something wrong with the link) and it won't add it again. A little known solution to solve many inter-wiki problems. ;-) Greetings. --Matthiaspaul (msg) 19:32, 26 nov 2011 (CET)

Thanks for the explanation and suggestion. --Almadannata (msg) 08:35, 27 nov 2011 (CET)