Shorteners are one way that a large part of the net is going.
Twitter and other microblogging drives that - a full WMF url won't easily
fit so people probably don't include them in many media where they otherwise
might well do so.
Making it clear these are WMF related, and also hosting them and/or having
rights to manage them, is important. Handling permalinks and not just
current revisions is important.
may or may not be a good one, but if not, then other possibilities
that convey the identity of the project can surely be identified if needed.
Not going to suggest any others on the open mailing list, but if the idea is
worth trying, I'm sure we'll find out to whom to send suggestions.
FT2
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 11:56 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 11 February 2011 11:30, Mingli Yuan
<mingli.yuan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> So I just want to know the possibility that foundation can support it or
not?
> And how should I improve the work to make
foundation accept this
service?
A URL shortener is a very good idea.
In general, URL shorteners are a terrible idea. They often rely on
third-party services, so at any point the links could put a pay wall or ads
in between click and target (or worse, stop working completely). They also
generally greatly reduce the value of a URL. They're good for spammers,
though.
Even for English, there's
http://enwp.org for
instance. English
Wikinews has
http://enwn.net . Neither of these is official.
These are a little better because even if
enwp.org dies or becomes a
different kind of site, it's possible to know what someone intended when
they wrote "enwp.org/foo".
But maybe having an official shortener would be a
good idea.
Maybe. It would at least mitigate the risk of a third-party going belly up.
A lot of organizations are using their own short URLs for this reason
(nytim.es and the like). That said, every page has a page ID (curid) and a
revision ID (oldid):
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=411553662
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20036
These can be made even shorter:
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=411553662
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=20036
Drawbacks to this are that using IDs instead of titles decreases the value
of the URLs and "curid" (a reference to the internal page.page_id) can
change if a page is deleted/undeleted. There are also interactions with
redirects and page moves to consider.
It largely depends on what the use-case for having such a short URL is
going
to be and how many costs are worth those benefits. The use-cases still seem
rather confined to me, while the overhead to setting up and maintaining
such
a service is not negligible.
MZMcBride
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