Well, the proposal at hand is still compatible with the old format of links.
Sure, under it, http://www.wikipedia.com/Taplop would not redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taplop, but upon arriving at http://wikipedia.com... there would be a list of links, among which the http://en.wiki... would be featured promptly with a label such as "English article about Taplop".
So, rather than just breaking compatability entirely, it is a sort of compromise.
Mark
On 22/10/05, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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)
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