Lars Aronsson wrote: How's that? Gerrit. -- Temperature in Luleå, Norrbotten, Sweden: | Current temperature 05-10-21 22:19:59 1.8 degrees Celsius ( 35.3F) | -- Det finns inte dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder.

Lars Aronsson wrote: 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. 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: Failing to find this in the archived mailing lists, I quote from a private message (<20011129161605.D24208(a)aristotle.bomis.com>) from Jimbo on November 29, 2001: This was part of a private thread, starting off at http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-November/018588.html -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

Mark Williamson wrote: 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)

Mark Williamson wrote: 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)

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

Mark Williamson wrote: "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

2005/10/22, Alphax <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com>om>: 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(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels