Rob Lanphier wrote:
Because then you sorta limit your extensibility, putting articles in the same namespace as your "api". Imagine: http://en.wikipedia.org/history -> article on "History" http://en.wikipedia.org/history/protect -> history of the article "Protect" http://en.wikipedia.org/protect/history -> protect the article "History" ...or is it the "History" subpage of the "Protect" article?
The rewrite rules get much simpler if the syntax is: http://<lang>.wikipedia.org/<action>/<article>
...and you have more room to grow without breaking URL permanence, because you haven't called dibbs on too many top-level path segments.
It seems to me that optimizing for the most common case is much more important than any of these corner case concerns. The extremely rare cases of namespace overlap can be handled specially. On en.wikipedia, of course, this would never be a problem because article titles are in title case, and commands are in lower case.
- David