On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 3:25 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/14 MinuteElectron minuteelectron@googlemail.com:
2009/3/14 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
Here's an idea: nice URLs for the history. So we don't end up with stupid things peppered with ? and & and = printed on mugs, travel guides, etc. e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/history/Xenu for the history of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu .
This is already possible in MediaWiki, using a feature called "action paths". It simply needs Apache rewrites setting up and a configuration variable within MediaWiki altering, there may be other implications in terms of internal organisation, robot functionality and caching though.
Oh, I know it's not hard (though mod_rewrite rules resemble alchemy more than anything deterministic or logical). So I suppose the question is: can we get this into the Wikimedia settings?
IIRC one reason to use wiki/ and w/ instead of "direct" URLs (en.wikipedia.org/Xenu) was to allow for non-article data at a later time (the other reason was to set noindex/nofollow rules). Looks like we will use that space after all :-)
What might /really/ be cool would be http://en.wikipedia.org/authors/Xenu
or even http://en.wikipedia.org/main_authors/Xenu filtering out minor contribs and IPs...
Magnus