Rob Lanphier wrote:
On Sat, 2005-07-23 at 22:49 +0200, Brion Vibber wrote:
More generally, it's completely irresponsible for a web-based resource to rearrange content pages without providing a redirect from the old URL. This is a basic principle which applies just as much to Wiktionary as to Wikipedia, just as much to Hewlett Packard's driver web pages as to Slashdot postings, just as much to a database of autogenerated earthquake reports or a collection of press releases as to an online academic journal.
100% agreed on this point, and one that many people don't seem to understand. So it bears repeating:
More generally, it's completely irresponsible for a web-based resource to rearrange content pages [well, just re-read the paragraph above :) ]
Actually, it bears restating. Here's an old Tim Berners-Lee rant on the subject, called "Cool URIs Don't Change", that I often trot out whenever the topic rears its ugly head, which it does way too frequently: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
In my mind, making an exception for Wiktionary projects would be an extremely disappointing reversal of very good policy maintained by the rest of the Wikimedia projects.
Rob
Hoi, Well Tim Berners-Lee has one good line on the Wiktionary situation: "Do you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If so, you chose them very badly." I was not there at the time but what I understood from some that the Wiktionary people where told that they could not have uncapitalised articles. This demand for uncapitalised articles did not go away and over time the cost of this change improved. It is certainly true for the Dutch wiktionary that there was a long time between the first request and the moment it was granted. I do not know if there ever was a technical reason why we could not have it, the only argument that I remember was that we needed something to do with case insensitive search, something we are still waiting for. All this procastinantion meant that several thousand words had to be changed, by hand in the Dutch case with a script in the English case.
It is "nice" to have persistence in your links. It is cool if it is just a technical choise because then it is a no brainer. In the Wiktionary case people do use redirects for correctly spelled words and as they are not interested in creating articles for the inflections they use redirects or they use redirects for the wrong spellings or they use redirects for different orthografies. So yes, it is disappointing but it is not a reversal of policy but the correction of a bad situation.
Thanks, GerardM