Lars Aronsson wrote:
Opposition to this move in 2002 held that existing links should not be broken. It was agreed that www.wikipedia.org (and .com) could become an international starting page, but that old article URLs, such as www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Chernobyl should not be broken, but should redirect to the new address on the English Wikipedia. This contract has been held since.
I think talking of this as a "contract" is somewhat overdoing it - it's an important point that this was the compromise reached during a previous discussion, but unless there's a *very* strong statement promising to uphold it "forever", we generally treat all consensus policies as re-negotiable.
An important document should be this archived e-mail, http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/intlwiki-l/2002-March/000361.html
Well, interestingly, he only says there "It might be nice if" and "All sublinks ... would" - not "should" or "But all sublinks ... must". He says that the site "must always respond appropriately", but it could be argued that this is only one version of "appropriate" behaviour.
After all, a link won't point to anything *like* the same actual *content* as it did in 2002, anyway. So the only requirement is that it point to an "appropriately equivalent" resource; and, arguably, the same article in different languages can be considered equivalent. So, if you give the choice of all languages with that title, you are saying "since the link you used was 'current', this resource has become more thoroughly multilingual", just as redirecting to the current page in en.wikipedia says "since the link you used was 'current', this resource has been collaboratively editted beyond all recognition".
On the other hand, such URLs should be used so rarely that it probably doesn't make much odds *what* we do with them...
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]