Some of the urls to Wikipedia will fail when converted by the mechanism in Twitter, so you either must use the ugly url in the tweet or use a short url. Because you usually want to control the overall length you must convert it to a short url before you know how long it will be.
In my opinion it wold be better if there was a simple way to generate short urls that also identified Wikipedia as such.
John
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 12:38 AM, [[w:en:User:Madman]] madman.enwiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 8:36 AM, John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
Yes I know you can do that, and in fact its what I do right now. The problem is that a few extra chars has a lot of impact in Twitter. A betetr approach would be if it was legal to write something like wikipedia.org/en/123456789 (26 chars) compared to en.wikipedia.org/aid/123456789 (30 chars) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=123456789 (44 chars). To get around the problem I use bit.ly for a bot, but its a bit stupid to not handle this in wikipedia itself.
This seems moot to me because it's handled in *Twitter* itself. All URLs in a tweet are converted to t.co shortcuts that are twenty characters long (while abbreviated versions of the destination URLs should be shown when the tweet is viewed). More information is here: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/14d....
Madman
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