Multiple Wikimedia communities are waiting[0] for us to deploy the ShortURL extension[1]. It looks like we want to move forward with deploying ShortURL; the code was reviewed by Roan and approved. Reedy says that someone needs to get the Apache rule correct and set-up (ticket for Apache rewrites is filed[2] but the link structure change hasn't been finalized), and that someone from ops should make "a few database tables to create on target wikis". Besides that, he says, "setup on the various wikis is a simple task and would only take a few minutes to do".
So we need to decide how to structure the Apache rewrites, an issue that touches ops, internationalisation, and maintenance concerns. There's additional discussion in the bug comments, but it seems to have stalled out. We've discussed URL shorteners a few times before on this list[3],[4]. Please leave your comments at bug 1450 so we can decide how to write the rewrite rule.
[0] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1450
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ShortUrl
[2] http://rt.wikimedia.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=2121
[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/59891
[4] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/58997/