Hi all,
Happy to announce that Short URLs are now available in every page of Tamil Wikipedia. Sharing Indic URLs with unicode characters are never fun since one will get an ugly looking URL like http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E... . (Forget about twitter, even mails are tough).Now its easier http://tawp.in/r/262 !! The short url is visible on top right of every page, extreme right of the article title. For the technically inclined, the shortening happens by encoding the page id of a mediawiki page to base36 (No database for shorturls here!) and hence doesnt depend on any other server.
I would like to thank User:Mountain[1] for the shortify project[2] which powers this. (Gerard, this is already localized in tamil,malayalam :) ). It would be great if this could be "extensionized" in mediawiki as its a feature must for wiki's running in non latin languages.I would also like to thank YuviPanda for setting this up on his server and doing some customization for Tamil wiki. (YuviPanda is an ubergeek looking to do some serious work for mediawiki in GSoC), Kishore for some quick css help in making this happen.
It would be great if this can be supported by Wikimedia itself. Even if the fancy twitter friendly short domain name is not there,if just the redirection part is hosted for all projects on wikimedia servers(existing domain names will do), it will be of great use, especially for non latin languages.
I understand Malayalam wikipedia has a redirect mechanism based on the english interwiki title for sometime now.Even we would want to do this, but am thinking if redirects are an optimal, search engine friendly solution or are there better ways of doing it.Can someone please educate me. Also IMHO URLs with transliterated text will help Indic languages. But making them search friendly is a key thing and if we could do this, am sure the readership would bound to increase a few times.(Not everyone knows to type in regional language and many use transliterated text for search and then consume vernacular content). Wikipedia is missing them!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mountain [2] https://github.com/mountain/shortify
Regards Srikanth.L
Great work! How do we add same feature in other Indic wikipedia like Bengali/Odia ?
With Warm Regards, *Jayanta Nath* Calcutta,West Bengal ______________________________
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If you add the following line on your vector.js (User:<Your_WikiUserName>/vecotr.js) you can see the short url on top right of every page like http://defn.me/r/ml/1c . I have tested it on Malayalam Wikipedia and it is working fine there.
importScript("User:Mountain/shorturl.js");
Please make sure that you have a page User:Mountain/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mountain/shorturl.jsshorturl.js http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mountain/shorturl.js on your local wiki else create page on your namespace and
change the user name above.
Thanks
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 10:42 PM, jayanta nath jayantanth@gmail.com wrote:
Great work! How do we add same feature in other Indic wikipedia like Bengali/Odia ?
With Warm Regards, *Jayanta Nath* Calcutta,West Bengal ______________________________
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Great initiative, really appreciable effort, even we would love to include the same in Odia Wiki. And everytime I need to post anything on Twitter I used to take the help of *bit.ly, *That would be solved now.
*ସୁଭପା**SubhashishPanigrahi* * ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ *_______________________________________________ Wikipedia Odia (Oriya) mailing list wikipedia-or@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-or *facebook.com/OdiaWiki* *Tweet* *@OdiaWiki*
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
Hi Santhosh,
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. :)
Yes, SEO on a seperate thread please. Am replying :)
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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Hi Srikanth,
Well done on the URL shortening work.
Wikimedia should take this and do a centralized shortening service. If each Wikimedia project is going to have different domain names Wikimedia branding value gets diluted. Also, the domain names, service need to be maintained forever and can't be relied upon individuals.
Ravi
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:39 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik.lak@gmail.comwrote:
Hi Santhosh,
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. :)
Yes, SEO on a seperate thread please. Am replying :)
Regards Srikanth.L http://srik.me
Happy to note that more communities started thinking about this issue. I remember raising this issue way back in 2009 or early 2010. But there were not much takers then.
Happy to announce that Short URLs are now available in every page of Tamil
Wikipedia.
Need to do some UI testing. For example, see this articlehttp://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%87%E0%AE%B2%E0%AE%99%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%88. We (Malayalam wikimedians) found several use cases like this when we customized pretty url for Malayalam
It would be great if this can be supported by Wikimedia itself.
That is a good suggestion Srikath. This type of solution is required in all non-latin wikis. In fact it is required even for some Latin wiki articles including English. For example, see this article from German wiki. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%84
I understand Malayalam wikipedia has a redirect mechanism based on the
english interwiki title for sometime now.
That is a wrong assumption. It is not just copy paste of English URL. If we were doing like that, what will happen to these type of articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica. It is again out with some ugly characters.
Even though Malayalam community was aware about the solution that Srikath provided, there are several reason for not going for it. Santhosh has already pointed out some of the major reasons. So not elaborating it more. But we have solution for the problem Srikanth mentioned right from late 2006.
ts just a template, but the problem is one needs to run a bot for all
existing articles to add the template with a fancy name.But ml wiki is primarily using english names, transliterated text to form pretty urls. Just as i type, Santhosh replied. More on another reply.
In fact redirect pages are very much required for each wiki article. We never know what all keywords people will use to search for wiki articles. All the possible keywords should be made redirects.
Think about people who come to wiki only for reading. They have so many obstacles to reach a particular wiki article. if we are able to understand this, we will be able to develop different solutions for them. That is why we developed many solutions including pretty url.
[4]
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%AB%E0%B4%B2%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%82:Prettyurl -- Its funny, prettyurl template extension url isnt pretty :P
The reason is, it contains localized namespace. But you have solution there also: http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Prettyurl
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. :)
In fact if you are not creating the redirect page *India* for the article இந்தியாhttp://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%87%E0%AE%A8%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%AF%E0%AE%BEin Tamil wiki, then that is very bad from reader's perspective. Yesterday I was introducing Tamil wiki to one of my tamil friend. The first word he typed in search box was *India*. We can't expect people to know typing in Tamil when they come there only for reading. Same case applies to all articles across various Indian language wikis.
But create only those redirect pages that make sense.
Shiju
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:39 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik.lak@gmail.comwrote:
Hi Santhosh,
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. :)
Yes, SEO on a seperate thread please. Am replying :)
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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Hi Shiju,
In fact redirect pages are very much required for each wiki article. We
never know what all keywords people will use to search for wiki articles. All the possible keywords should be made redirects. In fact if you are not creating the redirect page *India* for the article இந்தியாhttp://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%87%E0%AE%A8%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%AF%E0%AE%BEin Tamil wiki, then that is very bad from reader's perspective. Yesterday I was introducing Tamil wiki to one of my tamil friend. The first word he typed in search box was *India*. We can't expect people to know typing in Tamil when they come there only for reading. Same case applies to all articles across various Indian language wikis.
Each Wikimedia project shall have its own redirect policy.
In Tamil Wikipedia we discourage non-Tamil redirects and allow only redirects that make sense.
I think what we need to do is make the MediaWiki search smarter and not end up adding lakhs of redirects.
An ideal way would be to have two APIs combined :
1. Google transliteration API (or any other similar thing):
Transliterate the input to Tamil and see if an article exists.
2. An interwiki link API from English Wikipedia article title
If user searches for "India", then see if you have interwiki link for Tamil Wikipedia in that page.
So, the search logic will be:
* Search for article title matching the keyword.
If not present,
* Search for a transliterated title
If not present,
* Search for an interwiki link
else,
* Do a content search ( not article name search ) matching the transliteration.
Well, that's an idea for geeks to consider :)
Ravi
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 22:42, jayanta nath jayantanth@gmail.com wrote:
Great work! How do we add same feature in other Indic wikipedia like Bengali/Odia ?
To host it yourself like tawp.in follow the steps
1. Get a domain name. 2. Install node.js[1] and shortify[2] in your server. 3. Do minor changes in redirect.js in the shortify code to get suitable url pattern. 4. Add the shortify userscript in Mediawiki:vector.js (If you want to make it global to Wiki) or your vector skin while testing. 5. Modify the shortify userscript[3] to change the location where the short link comes, by default it comes below username (display breaks for anon users with the Narayam extn on, so change it to somewhere else on the page)
The above is hard way. Easy way is to localize shortify so that User:Mountain will host it for you under defn.me domain name. It supports tamil, malayalam now since they were localized already. Do check your language page http://defn.me/s/or OR http://defn.me/s/ http://defn.me/s/or<LangCode> for instructions. Its 10 min job :) (If you got problems here, send me across the localized file, i can commit in github if thats your problem)
Anoopan, It works in ml since it was already localized :)
Jayanta nath / Subhasish,
You can also consider PrettyURL[4] from ml wiki. Pesture Shiju / other ml friends :). Its just a template, but the problem is one needs to run a bot for all existing articles to add the template with a fancy name.But ml wiki is primarily using english names, transliterated text to form pretty urls. Just as i type, Santhosh replied. More on another reply.
[1] http://nodejs.org [2] https://github.com/mountain/shortify [3] http://tawp.in/r/1ygr -- Modified shorturl.js for position on right of article title. [4] http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%AB%E0%B4%B2%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%82:Prettyurl -- Its funny, prettyurl template extension url isnt pretty :P
Regards Srikanth.L http://srik.me
After talking with Srikanth for a bit more, I was able to quickly hackup this mediawiki extension[1] that does exactly the same thing tawp.in does now, but in the same domain. So you'll have URLs like http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ShortUrl/262. While definitely longer than http://tawp.in/r/262, it can be made much shorter via a simple apache mod_rewrite so http://ta.wikipedia.org/r/262 also works. The advantage of having it as an extension is, ofcourse, that the wikipedia is no longer dependent on code run on a 3rd party server (in this case, tawp.in).
[1]: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ShortUrl
Feedback welcome :)
P.S. My first ever mediawiki extension. I've verified it works, but testing would be welcome too :)
On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 07:14, Yuvi Panda yuvipanda@gmail.com wrote:
After talking with Srikanth for a bit more, I was able to quickly hackup this mediawiki extension[1] that does exactly the same thing tawp.in does now, but in the same domain. So you'll have URLs like http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ShortUrl/262. While definitely longer than http://tawp.in/r/262, it can be made much shorter via a simple apache mod_rewrite so http://ta.wikipedia.org/r/262 also works. The advantage of having it as an extension is, ofcourse, that the wikipedia is no longer dependent on code run on a 3rd party server (in this case, tawp.in).
Now that is *really quick*. It would definitely be useful for not just wikipedia, any non latin mediawiki can use this.There was a request on tamil wikipedia for tamil wikinews as well. I think polishing this and making it available on all non latin wiki will help :)
Feedback welcome :)
Feedback from mediawiki extn perspective : Options to set the "ShortURL" to be displayed on client side will help. For instance I could install this on mediawiki server, but for shortname sake I may still want the short domain name to be used (I might use mod_rewrite in the short domain). Also base 36 will not be able to cater larger wiki's like en.wiki. This should be made configurable. Probably the simplest way to display in client side is to add a line to Toolbox page. (This will make it "standardized") and also makes it load faster since there wont be an additional js download and will work even when non js browsers. ( #facepalm to me for having spent a long time trying to bring it on right spot on the UI [and still its buggy on FA pages])
Please post to Wikitech-I to get more technical feedback :)
P.S. My first ever mediawiki extension. I've verified it works, but testing would be welcome too :)
Welcome to Mediawiki. We need more love from geeks like you :) especially for a lot of indic solutions. Feel free to mail this list with any ideas you may have.
Regards Srikanth.L http://srik.me
Short Update.
As requested by Srikanth, I've implemented the user configurable "URL Prefix" so any domain with proper forwarding can be used. I've also added a link by default to Toolbox. Will add base64 encoding soon.
The Extension is live at http://wiki.busroutes.in. Example 'short' url is http://wiki.busroutes.in/wiki/Special:ShortUrl/18q. We could implement mod_rewrite rule and get it much shorter.
Is there interest in getting this out to tawiki? We could have URLs like, http://ta.wikipedia.org/r/1d2 or similiar.
Thanks much Yuvi. Great work. Looking forward for more hacks. I would post about this in Wikitech list and ask for suggestions / using the extension across Indic / non latin wikimedia projects. Probably we can rename as TidyURL since its not really short and short is not we care about,tidy is important(its a nice to have). Some more support for using the extension on all projects will do good in seeing this in real :)
Regardis Srikanth.L http://srik.me
On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 02:01, Yuvi Panda yuvipanda@gmail.com wrote:
Short Update.
As requested by Srikanth, I've implemented the user configurable "URL Prefix" so any domain with proper forwarding can be used. I've also added a link by default to Toolbox. Will add base64 encoding soon.
The Extension is live at http://wiki.busroutes.in. Example 'short' url is http://wiki.busroutes.in/wiki/Special:ShortUrl/18q. We could implement mod_rewrite rule and get it much shorter.
Is there interest in getting this out to tawiki? We could have URLs like, http://ta.wikipedia.org/r/1d2 or similiar.
-- Yuvi Panda T http://yuvi.in/blog
So you'll have URLs like http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ShortUrl/262. While definitely longer than http://tawp.in/r/262, it can be made much shorter via a simple apache mod_rewrite so http://ta.wikipedia.org/r/262 also works.
Way to go ! Thanks and congrats Yuvi.
Ravi
Happy to see the work on URL shortener. Congratulations for everyone involved. As domain names can be used in Indian languages, I actually would like to see the email clients and printing modules from browser improve so that they print the domain name in the native language rather than use English ASCII to represent the same.
Cheers Arjun
On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 10:29 AM, Ravishankar ravidreams@gmail.com wrote:
So you'll have URLs like
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ShortUrl/262. While definitely longer than http://tawp.in/r/262, it can be made much shorter via a simple apache mod_rewrite so http://ta.wikipedia.org/r/262 also works.
Way to go ! Thanks and congrats Yuvi.
Ravi
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Great work. Congratulations. When will this be extended to Devanagari? --Regards, Srikanth R.
On 1 April 2011 11:04, Arjuna Rao Chavala arjunaraoc@googlemail.com wrote:
Happy to see the work on URL shortener. Congratulations for everyone involved. As domain names can be used in Indian languages, I actually would like to see the email clients and printing modules from browser improve so that they print the domain name in the native language rather than use English ASCII to represent the same.
Cheers Arjun
On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 10:29 AM, Ravishankar ravidreams@gmail.com wrote:
So you'll have URLs like
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ShortUrl/262. While definitely longer than http://tawp.in/r/262, it can be made much shorter via a simple apache mod_rewrite so http://ta.wikipedia.org/r/262 also works.
Way to go ! Thanks and congrats Yuvi.
Ravi
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