Thanks for the reply. Yes, I know it doesnt help people identify the text. This was chosen for people to conveniently share on twitter. As Subhashish pointed out, people are anyway using bit.ly etc and we are getting into an era where people click URLs based on the comment preceeding it and not on the URL itself(Atleast in twitter). Other reason i opted this is because, its quicker to release. If am going to pretty URL solution (which has its advantages on readable URLs) I would need to run a bot and do a lot of work for 29000+ articles. :)

Regards
Srikanth.L
http://srik.me

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 23:31, Santhosh Thottingal <santhosh.thottingal@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,
URL shortners will not improve the search hits.
The above solution allows one to share the non latin wiki url using
English alphabets and Arabic numerals. Personally I would prefer a URL
I can remember and it should help me to identify to where it is
pointing without clicking on it.
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango clearly tells me that it is a
Malayalam wiki page about Mango
http://tawp.in/r/262 does not give that information to me. But that is
just a personal comment.

Srikanth mentioned a valid issue related to search engine optimization
with Indian wikis. I dont get any result for this query:
"Malayalam + Mango " to take me to Mango article in Malayalam wiki.
Because there is no way a search engine can index the word Mango in
english to the Malayalam wiki page of Mango. Having Mango in URL does
not help search engines.
I know some SEO tricks used by Malayalam news portals to address this.
They use Meta tag efficiently and put english and malayalam keywords
associated with the article. For eg: a news article about
Mullapperiyar Dam will contain a meta tag with keywords
"മുല്ലപ്പെരിയാര്‍ ഡാം, mullapperiyar dam, "
Some of the news portals even integrated this trick their news
publishing workflow with custom plugins to CMS systems(like Drupal).

If we want to get people searching in English to our wiki articles, we
can think about a Meta tag solution - some extension that injects
keywords to meta tag.

Don't we need to point show ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochi if one search
for Kochi? atleast within first 10 results?

(Sorry if I hijacked the thread, we may start another thread if we
want to discuss this further)

Thanks
Santhosh

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