[Wikipedia-l] Call for a vote (was: Moving the wikis)

[Lars Aronsson]

Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> All right, then, let's vote:
> RESOLVED:
> 1. That the English language wikipedia step down one level to
> www.wikipedia.org/en/ and
> 2. That www.wikipedia.org be the language-neutral front page, with
> links to the wikipedias of each language.

I think Jimmy promised me a year ago that the old URLs would be
permanently valid.  Is this something that can be voted on?  Would
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/William_Shakespeare still be a valid
URL to the article in English on William Shakespeare?

I might have written such URLs into several thousand web pages in
more or less static HTML, e.g.
http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/authors/shakewil.html
When I discover that such links are broken, I remove the links rather
than correct them, since a website that changed their URLs once is
likely to do so again.  I don't hate websites that change their URLs,
I just don't link to them.

Wikipedia should have a written policy for URLs, just like the GFDL
license.  Why should I want to contribute to a project where all URLs
can be changed by a vote the next month?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/