On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 18:01:58 +0100, Tels <nospam-abuse(a)bloodgate.com> wrote:
And even more
so, if
http://en.wikipedia.org/w
referred to the article [[w]], all the URLs of the form
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=... would instantly break
(in fact, they would point to pages called things like
[[w/index.php?title=...]]).
No, simple fix: don't redirect URLs with "/" in them. That would not allow
a redirect for the article "skins/scans", but articles with "/" in
them
are probably in the minority.
Well, as I said "While we could have all sorts of exceptions and
rearrangements and
special cases, it would be an absolute maintenance nightmare".
But to be more specific, the fact that such names are in the
*minority* doesn't make any difference - if short URLs of this form
were to be considered "correct" and even "normal", as people are
suggesting, they would have to *always* work. Otherwise, people would
just be extremely confused when they typed one in which *didn't* work
- if they were never redirected to the longer form (or, arguably, if
they didn't notice it, as with the former setup) they would have no
idea what was wrong with the address they'd typed.
In fact, without the check for "/", the
redirect would also redirect
"/wiki/article" to "/wiki/wiki/article", so it must be already in
place..
No, because this isn't actually a rewrite rule (as Alfio quite
reasonably guessed) but a 404 handler, for when people enter a URL
that doesn't exist. So no exceptions of this kind are needed, because
those URLs *do* exist (in as much as they are handled by the wiki
scripts).
One could also say that only wiki articles should live
under the
en.wikipedia.org namespace and everything else should be somewhere else,
like
files.wikipedia.org or
skins.wikipedia.org etc.
Yes, that would certainly be a possibilty - but note that each
sub-domain has its own installation of the MediaWiki software, so
unless we had sub-sub-domains, like
skins.en.wikipedia.org (which
would make administering DNS that much harder), this would probably
require some pretty major changes to the code to use some "common"
repository - including some way of handling the exceptions where
things *need* to be different, etc.
What's more, this still wouldn't deal with the issue of URLs like
.../w/index.php, which are inherently both project-dependent and part
of the core code. What's more, these aren't just used within the
software, but are extensively linked to externally, so any
rearrangement would have to leave them working as expected. Like I
say, any exception you make is going to be very confusing as soon as
somebody tries it expecting the opposite behaviour.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]