Hello,
This is a feature suggestion. I also submitted it through Mediazilla (#1450).
(It could be that something like this was already proposed, I just haven't found it).
It is nice to see what the URL is pointing to in English (or any ASCII-7 based alphabet).
Unfortunately, it is not the case for most other languages. For most of them, especially
for the languages which are not based on Latin alphabet, URL-escaping makes URL unreadable
and very very long. So, it would be nice to have some kind of short URLs for wikipedia
pages. This will make it easier for the user to copy and paste the short URL into e-mail
or on the web page. (I saw the reference to the wikipedia article in Russian in e-mail --
it is horrible: 3 lines of 80 chars each, absolutely unreadable).
The short URL itself could be something like this:
http://www.wiki???????.org/u/xyzuv
where
????? is a project name ({m,p}edia, etc)
u is a special prefix (may be empty);
xyzuv is an "encoded" form of longer URL
(very much like tinyurl.com's one).
It also would be nice to have this short URL on the printed page (as text, as well as a
link).
As a side-effect, the bots on #XXrc-channel will be less verbose. We, at #ru.wikipedia,
are using such short URLs, they seem more practical, and overall impression is better,
than while using wprc-bots directly.
Shorter URLs, happier users.
Best regards,
--
DIG (Dmitri I GOULIAEV)
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