Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

Sounds interesting, except you'd have a lot of links to trivial articles like [[is]]

(In reply to comment #0)
> I believe there should be a feature where you would be able to enter any text
> you want into a textbox, and when you press enter it gives you back the text,
> except any term that exists in the wikipedia is changed into a hyperlink, such
> as the articles on wikipedia. This could be used when people are talking on
> forums, and someone doesn't understand what a certain term means. An even more
> impressive addition would be an add-on to popular forums such as phpBB and IPB,
> that automatically adds the links when you post.

Although it's a nice idea, I'm resolving this "wontfix" because:
* it's not as trivial as it might seem to define "any term that exists in the
wikipedia"; for instance, how do you decide whether to link "King John" as
"[[King]] [[John]]" or "[[King John]]"?
* as pointed out, such a tool would not exclude unnecessary links such as "the",
which would be a pain. With nearly half a million articles on the English
Wikipedia, the chances are that most words in a paragraph would get linked to
something.
* due to amibiguity, not all of the links created would be relevant (some would
point to the wrong meaning of a term, and in some cases the relevant meaning
might not have an article); similarly, not all would be spelt exactly the same
as the equivalent article on Wikipedia.
* we already have a box where you can type an article name and click "Go" or
"Search"; if you need to explain a term to someone, you can look it up easily
enough. Indeed, you could just type "wikipedia.org/<the term>" into your browser.
* incorporating it into phpBB, etc, is a problem for the developers of that
software, not us - or, of course, for an outside enthusiast. 

Which leaves me on the note I want to leave on: such a tool *could* be created,
and might even have some use, but it would probably have to be completely
separate from the site, perhaps using the dumps of Wikipedia's content (from
http://download.wikimedia.org). With both servers and developers overworked, I
don't think such a tool will ever be a priority. 

(In reply to comment #2)
> ...
> * incorporating it into phpBB, etc, is a problem for the developers of that
> software, not us - or, of course, for an outside enthusiast. 
> ...

And there is at least one product doing just that, see Trillian at
http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/learn/index.php?select=6 .

Other existing integrations include the use of search plugins and javascript
bookmarklets in web browsers to do wikipedia lookups from selected or entered text.