Wouldn't it be much more convenient and straightforward to manage the Interwiki links through a wikipage? probably in the namespace "Mediawiki".
Or perhaps a structure in LocalSettings, much like almost everything else in Mediawiki.
Topic on Manual talk:Interwiki
Install (activate) the Extension:Interwiki see section Extension:Interwiki#Installation .
I'm aware of Extension:Interwiki. Thank you.
What I'm proposing is a different, in my opinion more direct approach, of managing interwiki links. An approach that can be programmatically realised and which doesn't involve messing up with the database tables.
Similar to what Extension:InterWiki does, instead.
Messing with wiki code (trying to interpret the code, auto-correct errors, etc) looks more crazy than doing the right thing and storing structured data on a database.
We disagree here. The structure is not that complex. Wiki editors are likely to be used to manipulating wikitext, especially those who are likely to be granted editing rights to the "Mediawiki:" namespace where such controls are likely to be.
On a more general note, I think configuration should all be in text files, or in wikipages. At least as much of it as possible.