Rob Lanphier wrote:
Let's say there's an article called "Particles", with a sub-article "Atom".
The "Particle" article would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/Particles
....and the Atom subarticle would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/Particles/Atom
I see you misunderstood. My proposal isn't to double the slash only in cases where it disambiguates an action. That would be stupid precisely for the reasons you mentioned. No, the canonical URL for [[a/b/c/d]] would be at http://en.wikipedia.org/A//b//c//d under my proposal.
But anyway. I understand everybody's concerns about the double-slashes, and they aren't a required portion of my proposal anyway, so we can change this. You could always encode them as %2F instead, or you could use ";edit" instead of "/edit" and then encode semicolons as %3B instead (the software already does this now).
In the spirit of putting the action at the end, perhaps this syntax would work: http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename?action=edit http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename?action=history
Of course it would "work", but it's not what I want because "?action=" is a pain to type.
....but it's far less ambiguous, and it's clear that it's an action performed on article "Pagename", rather than a page of its own.
But think about why that is the case. It's only because you know that the question mark ("?") cannot occur in the page title because it would be encoded as "%3F". Therefore, my proposal is essentially equivalent to yours except that the delimiting character is a single "/" and not a "?" and the proposed encoding is "//" and not "%2F". We can change any of these two parameters any way we like, just as long as we have a clear delimiter.
Slashes are more common in page titles only if the wiki makes extensive use of subpages. In actual articles (zero-namespace pages), the question mark is way more common (e.g. [[Is Everybody Listening?]]). I think the semicolon (";") is rarer than both of these, so even if you think it's unusual, it may be a better choice than both "/" and "?".
Greetings, Timwi