On Thu, 2005-07-07 at 22:49 -0700, David Friedland wrote:
Also, why can't articles just be at the root?
so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page which is equivalent to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and http://en.wikipedia.org/article/Main_Page
Because then you sorta limit your extensibility, putting articles in the same namespace as your "api". Imagine: http://en.wikipedia.org/history -> article on "History" http://en.wikipedia.org/history/protect -> history of the article "Protect" http://en.wikipedia.org/protect/history -> protect the article "History" ...or is it the "History" subpage of the "Protect" article?
The rewrite rules get much simpler if the syntax is: http://<lang>.wikipedia.org/<action>/<article>
...and you have more room to grow without breaking URL permanence, because you haven't called dibbs on too many top-level path segments.
but also: http://en.wikipedia.org/edit/Main_Page http://en.wikipedia.org/history/Main_Page and hopefully... http://en.wikipedia.org/delete/Main_Page http://en.wikipedia.org/protect/Main_Page http://en.wikipedia.org/move/Main_Page etc.
This is a good idea. It'd be really nice to get all of the technology out of the URLs (e.g. ".php" file extensions) so that maintaining URL permanence doesn't mean maintaining strange mappings, even if MediaWiki is rewritten in a completely different language one day.
Rob