Amir,

My initial, gut reaction to your suggestion was positive. I like that you have thought of a way to make blog content more accessible to the public.

However, on reflection: * The Planet Wikimedia blog predates the Wikimedia Foundation's blog by some years, and is well populated by a variety of people blogging about Wikipedia and the other projects. * I run a blog that's almost entirely dedicated to Wikipedia, as do many other individuals (off the top of my head, Gerard Meijssen is one, Erik Zachte, etc.) * Many affliliated organizations (such as the Wiki Education Foundation, Wiki Med Foundation, and various chapters) have their own Wikipedia-oriented blogs as well.

I believe (as others have said) the primary result of your proposal is that it would make the official Wikimedia blog more discoverable; but that increase would come at the expense of community-driven efforts. On that basis, I can't support it. I think the results people get typing queries like "Wikipedia blog" into search engines are adequate. The Wikimedia blog already has the top (blog) spot on that specific query. I don't see any compelling reason to further increase its SEO performance at the expense of other Wikipedia-oriented blogs.

-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]

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