On 14/01/07, Christopher Thieme cdthieme@gmail.com wrote:
As to other links in print sources. Whoever wrote up marketing materials with " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page " on it should be dragged into the street and shot, or at least fired because anyone in ad copy will tell you to state shorter URLs on such materials, or your target audience won't find it or (worse) they'll ignore it. Heck, I type en.wikipedia.org each time I get to Wikipedia, but I'm not most people. Most people don't think when looking at or responding to ads, written materials, etc. Any smart marketing/adcopy person would have told you to get put together materials saying " www.wikipedia.com "
Jimbo, if that's the case, fire the marketing department.
This isn't "the marketing department". It's the public. The one academic article I can remember offhand - in the Journal of American History - which deals with us does indeed, footnote ".../Main_Page". It's all the newspaper stories which talk about us and give the mainpage URL at the end. It's the thousands, tens of thousands, of people who link into us from the rest of the web, and dutifully - and sensibly - do so to the URL we give as our front page. We have all these things pointing to "Main_Page". None of them are going to go away. There is no pressing reason to move the page; so why do it?
There is nothing to me that seems more futile than making a vast fuss about changing something to fit into an arbitrary scheme which we ourself chose to impose. We wrote these rules. We are perfectly capable of exercising our common sense in choosing when they apply.