David Friedland wrote:
Rob Lanphier wrote:
Because then you sorta limit your extensibility, putting articles in the same namespace as your "api". Imagine: http://en.wikipedia.org/history -> article on "History" http://en.wikipedia.org/history/protect -> history of the article "Protect" http://en.wikipedia.org/protect/history -> protect the article "History" ...or is it the "History" subpage of the "Protect" article?
The rewrite rules get much simpler if the syntax is: http://<lang>.wikipedia.org/<action>/<article>
...and you have more room to grow without breaking URL permanence, because you haven't called dibbs on too many top-level path segments.
It seems to me that optimizing for the most common case is much more important than any of these corner case concerns.
I sit at the other end of the bug reports, and I can assure you the opposite is true.
The current URLs *work* and with little more than aesthetic preference for a change, a change that actually is KNOWN to fail in cases that are currently handled correctly is just not going to happen.
Note that Wikipedias can be fully expected to have articles on [[robots.txt]] and [[favicon.ico]] etc... :) We *must* have a clear namespace, unfettered by exceptions or no-title-zones. This is non-negotiable.
The extremely rare cases of namespace overlap can be handled specially.
Handling things "specially" is a recipe for disaster, and generally means "there will be a bunch of big nasty bugs here". It's far, far better to handle these things generically by eliminating the bug breeding ground.
Pretty much any and all "rare" cases will be found as people try to put articles at them and run up against a brick wall.
On en.wikipedia, of course, this would never be a problem because article titles are in title case, and commands are in lower case.
This argument fails for a number of reasons, including:
* On wikis with capitalized titles we accept incoming links with both lower- and uppercase forms, with automatic redirecting where necessary. Changing this may break existing links, including interwiki links, unnecessarily. Note that interwiki links do not force the capital letter on the outgoing link since it's unknown whether the software on the other end is case-sensitive or not.
* At some point we *will* move to a fully case-insensitive, case-preserving title system. There *will* be titles with initial lowercase letters on the English Wikipedia at that time.
* Right now on a number of our wikis, link capitalization is not enforced and there *are now* titles with initial lowercase letters. These include a fair number of major Wiktionaries and a couple artificial-language Wikipedias.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)