On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 23:11, Tei oscar.vives@gmail.com wrote:
On 26 March 2012 08:38, Ariel T. Glenn ariel@wikimedia.org wrote: ..
As one of those non latin script users, it irks me no end when I see a url that is opaque to me soley because it's been url-encoded. I would love a "smarter" url shortener; there's no reason projects with a latin1 script should produce human readable urls while the rest of us get to guess where links on our projects lead. Even somewhat weird romanization is better than what we have now.
Ariel
Perhaps this is one of these problems that can't be solved just with computers.
These can be solved, but may not be out of the box without writing some extra code / spending some time.
1. Malayalam and Odia are creating titles in latin and redirect them, display the latin urls using a prettyurl template[1] and each editor takes the extra bit of time to create these redirects and it works for them!
2. Then there is interwiki based redirection tools like wikishortpy[2] which are being used by Tamil Wikipedia. http://tawp.in/e/Tamil redirects to http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%AE%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%B4%E0%AF%8D along with the "micro-blogging use case" url http://tawp.in/r/2vd1
3. When there is working code on script conversion of each language into latin, we can have human identifiable "easy to type" URLs. These will also be helpful on feature mobiles where one may not have typing solution. It will happen sooner or later nonetheless.
[1] http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Prettyurl [2] https://github.com/yuvipanda/wikishortipy