Poor, Edmund W wrote:
All right, then, let's vote: RESOLVED:
- That the English language wikipedia step down one level to
www.wikipedia.org/en/ and 2. That www.wikipedia.org be the language-neutral front page, with links to the wikipedias of each language.
I think Jimmy promised me a year ago that the old URLs would be permanently valid. Is this something that can be voted on? Would http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/William_Shakespeare still be a valid URL to the article in English on William Shakespeare?
I might have written such URLs into several thousand web pages in more or less static HTML, e.g. http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/authors/shakewil.html When I discover that such links are broken, I remove the links rather than correct them, since a website that changed their URLs once is likely to do so again. I don't hate websites that change their URLs, I just don't link to them.
Wikipedia should have a written policy for URLs, just like the GFDL license. Why should I want to contribute to a project where all URLs can be changed by a vote the next month?