Lodewijk wrote:
Another reason for doing this, is to cover people who
are actually looking
for the official blog (please note that many volunteers also write at
blog.wikimedia.org), but who simply confuse wikimedia and wikipedia - not
entirely uncommon.
blog.wikimedia.org is the closest this there is for the
official wikipedia-blog and until there is a separate, official, wikipedia
blog, i would be in favor for redirecting this url.
I don't see how this would go at the expense of other blogs. indeed many
cross-project pages such as
meta.wikipedia.org redirect to the right page,
because it is clear what people were aiming for when they typed the url.
Meta-Wiki began at
meta.wikipedia.org. There's a redirect in place from
when it moved to
meta.wikimedia.org. There's an unrelated redirect for
commons.wikipedia.org, entirely for convenience, I think. There are not
similar redirects in place for
wiktionary.org or other domains.
I agree with you that the search engine optimization arguments are weak
and that redirects are cheap. Would you (Lodewijk) just want
blog.wikipedia.org or would you want the others (
blog.wiktionary.org,
blog.wikinews.org, etc.) and would you want both HTTP and HTTPS support?
Amir Ladsgroup wrote:
We already have some subdomains that are not related to
language, biggest
example:
ten.wikipedia.org
Sure, but it's worth nothing that many people strenuously objected to
ten.wikipedia.org (and now
15.wikipedia.org) from being created where they
were created. Putting aside the questionable practice of using a numeral
at the beginning of a hostname, a lot of technical infrastructure assumes
that
__.wikipedia.org is reserved for a language code (and for a MediaWiki
wiki). Redirects aren't as bad a violation of this assumption as a full
site would be, however.
My motivation of this request is that makes access for
people who doesn't
know what's wikimedia easier. Everyone knows wikipedia but less people
know about wikimedia and the organization behind wikipedia. I had to
explain this everytime I'm invited by WMF and visa officer asks me "what
is wikimedia?" it may lead to better recognition of WMF by wikipedia
readers. I won't make a huge difference. Just a redirect.
The better comparison is
shop.wikipedia.org (or
store.wikipedia.org). I
think part of the hesitation with this request is that it's likely not
just a (one) redirect, you're likely talking about two redirects for each
domain (HTTP and HTTPS). And then if you want to support other domains,
you're talking about another twenty redirects, probably. Even more if you
wanted, for example, "blog" and "blogs" to both work. This is what
happened with {shop,store}.wikimedia.org. For a period of time, we
supported variants such as
shop.wikisource.org and
store.wikinews.org and
shop.wikimediafoundation.org. The list was culled in April 2015.
Anyway, we certainly have the technical capacity and capability to add
more redirects. We already support a ton of them (
donate.wikipedia.org,
careers.wikipedia.org,
textbook.wikipedia.org, etc.), the question is
whether we want to add a small number of redirects to the pile.
MZMcBride