On 8/11/06, Nick Jenkins nickpj@gmail.com wrote:
Well if http://en.wikipedia.org/XYZ redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ , and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ either is the real content (or a redirect to the real content in the future event of a URL system change, so as to maintain stable URLs), then wouldn't that be okay?
No, because then people get used to entering it like that . . . and they happily go on entering it like that . . . and then one day, they're interested in looking up info about the Robot Exclusion Policy Protocol and type in http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt . . . and WTF? There's not really much mileage in encouraging people to continue using such links. Who knows what files and directories someone might want to put in the root directory of enwiki?