Hi,
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl. It shouldn't. Should it provide a list off all Wikipedia's with an article [[Chernobyl]]?
Gerrit.
Gerrit Holl wrote:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl. It shouldn't.
Yes it should. It's a contract.
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Gerrit Holl wrote:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl. It shouldn't.
Yes it should. It's a contract.
How's that?
Gerrit.
Gerrit Holl wrote:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Gerrit Holl wrote:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl. It shouldn't.
Yes it should. It's a contract.
How's that?
In the beginning (Jan 15, 2001) was the English www.wikipedia.com, and then (March 16, 2001) came deutsche.wikipedia.com. When more languages were added (summer 2001), two character language codes were applied. As far as I can see from my e-mail archive, the idea to move the English Wikipedia to a language code domain was first suggested on intlwiki-l on March 25, 2002. The oldest archive.org version of en.wikipedia.org is from November 2002.
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.
An important document should be this archived e-mail, http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/intlwiki-l/2002-March/000361.html
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]
Rowan Collins wrote:
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.
There is such a promise.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Rowan Collins wrote:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
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"
Failing to find this in the archived mailing lists, I quote from a private message (20011129161605.D24208@aristotle.bomis.com) from Jimbo on November 29, 2001:
I'm not sure what you mean. There already IS a URL policy. Wikipedia urls are of the form: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Article_Title This will always be true.
This was part of a private thread, starting off at http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-November/018588.html
I'm not sure what you mean. There already IS a URL policy. Wikipedia urls are of the form: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Article_Title This will always be true.
It doesn't say "English Wikipedia".
Thus, the _new_ policy proposed by Geritt should be in line with this quote which we have to follow because it came from above.
Mark
Mark Williamson wrote:
It doesn't say "English Wikipedia".
Thus, the _new_ policy proposed by Geritt should be in line with this quote which we have to follow because it came from above.
The http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/* and http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/* URL spaces are permanently reserved for maintaining past links to English Wikipedia, which is currently living at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*.
Since they are permanently reserved for existing past links, no new use of that space is possible.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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"?
Mark
On 22/10/05, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
It doesn't say "English Wikipedia".
Thus, the _new_ policy proposed by Geritt should be in line with this quote which we have to follow because it came from above.
The http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/* and http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/* URL spaces are permanently reserved for maintaining past links to English Wikipedia, which is currently living at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*.
Since they are permanently reserved for existing past links, no new use of that space is possible.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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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)
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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There is a misassesment of the situation on the part of users wanting www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article to be an interwiki disambiguation. You think that www subdomain would be an ''official'' wikipedia URL that somehow rests symbolically above any of the de, en, es or other language subdomains - hence, your refusal to accept the ''official'' subdomain to be subordinated to the english portion of wikipedia.
But www is not an official URL anymore. www is an archival URL! This is because nowhere in wikipedia.org does the MediaWiki software produce links in the form of www.wikipedia.org, but they will always be langdomain.wikipedia.org Search for it. www is a cruft from the english+deutsch dual wikipedia era, and serves those few hundred (thousand?) links made to WP in that specific period of time (if I read correctly the discussion so far) NO ONE links to www today, because simply there isn't a way to get to that address. Type it, and it hard-forwards you to the en. domain - the browser will not let you copy+paste the www URL to your web editor.
If you really wanted an interlanguage disambig, (is this really needed, or is this just a filler-up for the imaginedly existing www official subdomain? ), then the best solution would be creating another subdomain for that purpose - of course, the ideological problem remains - should the menu for that MediaWiki installation be in english? how can it be multilingual? But I think such attempt is unnecessary.
----
On a separate note, IF the idea of pushing for interlanguage www subdomains came forward, I would strongly advice against "intelligent" language pickers based on predefiner browser settings, IP geography, OS regional settings or otherwise - a large population of internet users are not monolingual, and we link specific language versions of wikipedia (using del.icio.us for example) for a specific purpose. (Different content! Different audience!)
Yongho
This was a moral engagement at the time it was done. I agree with Brion this moral agreement should not be changed.
Ant
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"?
Mark
On 22/10/05, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
It doesn't say "English Wikipedia".
Thus, the _new_ policy proposed by Geritt should be in line with this quote which we have to follow because it came from above.
The http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/* and http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/* URL spaces are permanently reserved for maintaining past links to English Wikipedia, which is currently living at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*.
Since they are permanently reserved for existing past links, no new use of that space is possible.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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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"?
Mark
"Cool URIs don't change" by Tim Berners-Lee http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI should be required reading on this topic.
Which reminds me: it might be interesting to consider the use of some outside-the-web URI namespace in addition to Wikipedia URLs for truly persistent documents; for example, the doi: namespace, which identifies a specific thing, rather than where to find it, and may be more useful that URLs for serious long-term (> 100 years) references to objects. We already go some way towards doing this with article revision numbering, but the renderings of even fixed revisions of an article are still mutable, as images, templates, and software changes change under them.
To work properly, unlike the current scheme for revisions, a permanent version identifier for a truly persistent immutable document would need to capture the state of not only the wikitext of that article version, but the side-effects of context of the rendered page at the time of snapshot (template expansions, images, current software version and settings, user prefs etc.) at the moment of creation.
Clearly it is impractical, to say the least, to represent an article by a complete snapshot of an installation; however, all that is really needed is a snapshot of the complete rendered/renderable article including all content referenced. Perhaps a .tgz of an HTML+files tree of a rendered Wiki page, or an XML file containing all the necessary data including images etc., or a .pdf, might be a suitable format for capturing truly immutable snapshots of Wikipedia articles, with the DOI being based on a high-quality hash of the generated file content?
(See http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/enumeration.html for more context.)
-- Neil
I read it. I still have the same opinion.
It says absolutely nothing about whether or not it's OK to change URLs if the old URL links to the new one.
If it weren't, wouldn't it be bad to create disambigs where pages already exist? Hmm? HMM?
Mark
On 24/10/05, Neil Harris usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk 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"?
Mark
"Cool URIs don't change" by Tim Berners-Lee http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI should be required reading on this topic.
Which reminds me: it might be interesting to consider the use of some outside-the-web URI namespace in addition to Wikipedia URLs for truly persistent documents; for example, the doi: namespace, which identifies a specific thing, rather than where to find it, and may be more useful that URLs for serious long-term (> 100 years) references to objects. We already go some way towards doing this with article revision numbering, but the renderings of even fixed revisions of an article are still mutable, as images, templates, and software changes change under them.
To work properly, unlike the current scheme for revisions, a permanent version identifier for a truly persistent immutable document would need to capture the state of not only the wikitext of that article version, but the side-effects of context of the rendered page at the time of snapshot (template expansions, images, current software version and settings, user prefs etc.) at the moment of creation.
Clearly it is impractical, to say the least, to represent an article by a complete snapshot of an installation; however, all that is really needed is a snapshot of the complete rendered/renderable article including all content referenced. Perhaps a .tgz of an HTML+files tree of a rendered Wiki page, or an XML file containing all the necessary data including images etc., or a .pdf, might be a suitable format for capturing truly immutable snapshots of Wikipedia articles, with the DOI being based on a high-quality hash of the generated file content?
(See http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/enumeration.html for more context.)
-- Neil
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On 21/10/05, Gerrit Holl gerrit@nl.linux.org wrote:
Hi,
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl. It shouldn't. Should it provide a list off all Wikipedia's with an article [[Chernobyl]]?
One of the reasons for this is because historically it has always meant that - well, that's kind of obvious, but what I mean is that there are existing links on other websites (and who knows where else) of the form "http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/<article>", intending to reference the English Wikipedia specifically.
That said, I actually rather like the idea of auto-listing all languages whose Wikipedia has an article with that exact name - it doesn't exactly *break* those links, but it serves as an interesting introduction to/reminder of the multilingual nature of Wikipedia, and indeed of the Internet in general. It's all to easy for English-speakers such as myself to take for granted that all content will default to English, when, really, why should it?
Of course, there are theoretically mechanisms for detecting the browser's language, so if they were reliable (which I'm not 100% convinced about) we could use those to redirect. But then that still requires a default if, say, my browser declares I "accept" German or French, but the article exists only in English or Spanish. And since these links are technically "incorrect" anyway (at the very least, out of date) it doesn't seem worth trying too hard to give the "perfect" result for someone using them.
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]
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Rowan Collins wrote:
On 21/10/05, Gerrit Holl gerrit@nl.linux.org wrote:
Hi,
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl. It shouldn't. Should it provide a list off all Wikipedia's with an article [[Chernobyl]]?
One of the reasons for this is because historically it has always meant that - well, that's kind of obvious, but what I mean is that there are existing links on other websites (and who knows where else) of the form "http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/<article>", intending to reference the English Wikipedia specifically.
That said, I actually rather like the idea of auto-listing all languages whose Wikipedia has an article with that exact name - it doesn't exactly *break* those links, but it serves as an interesting introduction to/reminder of the multilingual nature of Wikipedia, and indeed of the Internet in general. It's all to easy for English-speakers such as myself to take for granted that all content will default to English, when, really, why should it?
Here's my idea - it would require a bit of work though:
1) If article exists on en:, auto-generate a multilingual disambiguation page using the interwiki links in the article.
2) If the article doesn't exist on en:, 2a) auto-generate a list of links to possible articles in Wikipedias with > x,000 articles (where x depends on how well the software works). Make no guarantee about the existance of the target article. 2b) scan the Wikipedias with > x,000 articles, pull out all interwiki links if one is found (stripping duplicates if it exists under the same name in multiple lanuages) and generate a disambiguation page.
This way, we both guarantee that all existing links work (to the same extent as when we move pages and create redirects, or turn things into disambiguation pages), while at the same time creating a multilingual portal.
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
2005/10/22, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com:
Here's my idea - it would require a bit of work though:
- If article exists on en:, auto-generate a multilingual disambiguation
page using the interwiki links in the article.
- If the article doesn't exist on en:,
2a) auto-generate a list of links to possible articles in Wikipedias with > x,000 articles (where x depends on how well the software works). Make no guarantee about the existance of the target article. 2b) scan the Wikipedias with > x,000 articles, pull out all interwiki links if one is found (stripping duplicates if it exists under the same name in multiple lanuages) and generate a disambiguation page.
This way, we both guarantee that all existing links work (to the same extent as when we move pages and create redirects, or turn things into disambiguation pages), while at the same time creating a multilingual portal.
Why use the Interwiki-links? Just check all languages for an article with that exact name. On http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun, I want a link to [[de:Sun Microsystems]] (which is the page [[de:Sun]] redirects to), and not one to [[de:Sonne]] (which is the page [[en:Sun]] has an interwiki to).
-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
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Andre Engels wrote:
2005/10/22, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com:
Here's my idea - it would require a bit of work though:
- If article exists on en:, auto-generate a multilingual disambiguation
page using the interwiki links in the article.
- If the article doesn't exist on en:,
2a) auto-generate a list of links to possible articles in Wikipedias with > x,000 articles (where x depends on how well the software works). Make no guarantee about the existance of the target article. 2b) scan the Wikipedias with > x,000 articles, pull out all interwiki links if one is found (stripping duplicates if it exists under the same name in multiple lanuages) and generate a disambiguation page.
This way, we both guarantee that all existing links work (to the same extent as when we move pages and create redirects, or turn things into disambiguation pages), while at the same time creating a multilingual portal.
Why use the Interwiki-links? Just check all languages for an article with that exact name. On http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun, I want a link to [[de:Sun Microsystems]] (which is the page [[de:Sun]] redirects to), and not one to [[de:Sonne]] (which is the page [[en:Sun]] has an interwiki to).
What about [[Taxi]] or any other words which have entered into English from another language?
You could even do interwiki links AND top Wikipedia checking. Or even any disambiguation pages linked off the interwikis.
Clearly, having "www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article" redirect exclusively to en: is a bad thing.
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