On 5/17/2011 8:00 PM, John Vandenberg wrote:
Is there a good reason for us to always include the '/wiki/' in the URL? Removing the prefix would save five characters, and I'm guessing that it would also save a measurable amount of traffic serving 5KB 404 pages.
Is there something else on these virtual hosts other than a few regexes which are extremely unlikely to be used as page names (i.e. /w/.*.php).
I think you should always keep control of your top-level namespace on a web server, because once you lose control of it you've got no control. If, someday, Wikipedia wants to add some new URLs, it's free to do that because they didn't let every Tom, Dick and Harry pollute the global namespace.
This is particularly important if you want to use third-party software of some kind. The worst thing you can do is install Wordpress, Drupal or something like that in a top-level directory, because then you're stuck. If you install it in a subdirectory, you're always free to install something else in another subdirectory and use it in parallel. If you want to switch to a different CMS, you can put it in a new directory, and then build a 301 redirect machine that keeps all of your links working.