On Sun, 18 Nov 2012 13:46:56 -0800, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Perhaps ask Ward Cunningham if he'd be willing to donate the wiki.org domain to the WMF cause, and have links of the form
wiki.org/<token> ?
to pages on any or all of the WMF-hosted sites?
"wiki.org" is just as memorable as "wi.ki", in my opinion.
Over a billion possible URLs would map quite easily into just six base 35 digits, enough to handle (I think) every revision of every page so far created on all the WMF wikis. That is to say, base 35 using 0-9 plus a-z, without the letter "l" -- easy to type without having to work the shift key up and down, as with so many URL shorteners.
The use of lowecase only makes them easy to read out over the phone and remembered for short periods of a few seconds -- for example,
wiki.org/31z8f2
can be read out as "wiki.org three one zed eight f two". For added goodness, case could be ignored, and "L" interpreted as "1", to further reduce the impact of mis-reading the tokens.
-- Neil
I actually think we should avoid the use of any short domain based on the word 'wiki' for wmf hosted sites.
People still make the mistake thinking that 'wiki' = 'Wikipedia'. We really should not swipe a generic name and perpetuate the misunderstanding with a domain that calls WMF wikis 'wiki'.
My favorite right now is "en.wp.w.mf". Unless you want to spend $100,000. ;) In which case we could revive the age old wish of a .wiki tld, grab some short names for wmf wikis, and make .wiki available for registration of all wiki.
I also like the idea of including a subdomain/path besides the short ID like en.wp.??? so that you can actually understand what site you are going to.