Mark Williamson wrote:
What exactly do you mean by "permanently
reserved"?
Is there some sort of binding legal document which says this? Or is it
just a matter of "We could very well change it but we just don wanna"?
Our responsibility to our users requires us to continue to forward past
URLs. Any site that actually gives a crap about being a useful
information resource on the web will make a similar commitment to do
this. (Sadly, many sites are bad at this, and enjoy damaging every link
to their resources every year or two.)
I personally promised on this list that we would maintain permanent URL
compatibility when we switched English Wikipedia to
en.wikipedia.org;
such compatibility is a firm requirement for changes to our site layout.
The only reason there exists a "www.wikipedia" is that English Wikipedia
used to be there, because it was once the only one. Now it's been moved,
and the old URLs forward transparently. Inventing new unreliable URLs to
go there and breaking our historical compatibility guarantees is not
only a violent attack upon the site's goals, it's a useless solution in
search of a problem.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)