Benjamin Lees emufarmers@gmail.com writes:
I see two different use cases here: one, you have URLs that need to be short so they can fit in Twitter messages and the like. Here, it doesn't matter whether the URL is human-readable, as long as it's short. The other use case is that you want to give people a human-rememberable URL in speech or on TV or the like, where it can't be hyperlinked. There it should be short but ideally also descriptive.
There is a third use case that people on zhwiki, hiwiki, arwiki and other wikis that don't use latinate characters have: avoiding URI encoding.
For example, http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/数学结构, when it is copy-pasted from Firefox, becomes http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%95%B0%E5%AD%A6%E7%BB%93%E6%9E%84.
The same goes for http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/मुखपृष्ठ, which becomes http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%96%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%83%E0%A4%B7%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A0.
From what I can see, the micro-blogging use case fits the needs of these
users nicely.
Mark.