Timwi wrote:
Another major disadvantage I thought of just now is that it poisons our namespace. Suppose some silly company makes some sort of product and (to be cool) calls it "fr:ea:ky". How would we name our article on it? It's only a matter of time until this will be an actual problem.
This is a non-starter; you can't link to such titles within the wiki, because they are interwiki links. A manually constructed URL used to just give an 'Illegal title' error, except where we had a special-case on www.wikipedia.org to do outgoing redirects.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)