* Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak(a)gmail.com> [Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:29:33
+0530]:
Hi all,
Sharing of URLs of non latin wiki's werent really easy and when copy
pasting
we get the unicode numerals in the URL like
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%…
en:User:Mountain had come up with a shortify project[1] and thanks to
Yuvipanda its now live on Tamil Wikipedia. All pages have a link on
the
right side of article title.
http://tawp.in/r/262 is
the same link and
is
being displayed there. The feedback from the community is to have this
hosted by Wikimedia itself as it would be more reliable than
individual
running it. So there came the idea of a mediawiki
extension and hence
Shorturl extension[2] was born by some really quick work by
Yuvipanda.Its
live here[3].(See the toolbox for short URL) While this may be a small
thing, it does help non latin wiki's a lot.Having it in the extension
form
is more reliable even though the URL length goes up, but still its
worthy.The URL length can be shortened with mod_rewrite rules on. I
would
ideally like this to be used across non latin wikimedia properties as
it
helps these projects(like echoed here[4]). Please let
me know how to
do
this. Bugs on wikimedia bugzilla will do?
Feedback appreciated.
I wish the numerous http and mail clients as well as web engines were
able to display such links "urldecoded", like Firefox does. I've made
such patch for MediaWiki
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25934
However, phpbb didn't decode such links, IE6/7/8 not as well :-( A lots
of software and web engines probably has to be updated to recognize the
utf-8 URI's.
Dmitriy