On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 12:23 AM,
MZMcBride<z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
It looks like a nice usability fix. :-) (Now to
get Special:MovePage turned
into ?action=move....)
I'd do the opposite -- stop using actions other than view, and move
everything to special pages. (Of course we'd still support the
old-style URLs forever for compat, just not generate them anywhere.)
The set of things that are done by actions is small, fixed, and
incoherent: edit, history, delete, protect, watch; but not move,
undelete, export, logs, related changes. The distinction is
historical -- I assume most or all of the action-based ones came about
before we had such a thing as special pages. It would be cleaner if
we only had special pages for doing non-view actions.
I think we've had both actions and special pages from the beginning
(well, since r403 at least). I suspect it's just that adding new
special pages was easier than adding new actions, so people tended to
pick the path of least resistance.
--
Ilmari Karonen