On 18/11/12 04:28, Ryan Lane wrote:
On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 5:30 PM, Juergen Fenn schneeschmelze@googlemail.com wrote:
2012/11/17 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com:
I'm not sure I'd say wi.ki is off the table... aside from a domain donation, the Wikimedia Foundation now has an annual budget of somewhere around $30 million, I think. If it wanted to drop a few thousand dollars to buy a shorter domain name, I think it could afford to. The question has become whether doing so is a good idea. :-)
You must be joking. There is http://ur1.ca/ as a free URL shortener already as a Free service. We should use it and please forget about spending too much money on such "cool" URLs...
It's not a matter of "cool urls". Like we don't rely on third parties for other critical services, we shouldn't for a shortener either. URLs shouldn't change and shouldn't die. If that third party resource goes away we'd have a ton of shortened links dead.
Finding a cool, short, url is part of the process of setting up a shortener. Why not suggest some alternatives?
- Ryan
Perhaps ask Ward Cunningham if he'd be willing to donate the wiki.org domain to the WMF cause, and have links of the form
wiki.org/<token> ?
to pages on any or all of the WMF-hosted sites?
"wiki.org" is just as memorable as "wi.ki", in my opinion.
Over a billion possible URLs would map quite easily into just six base 35 digits, enough to handle (I think) every revision of every page so far created on all the WMF wikis. That is to say, base 35 using 0-9 plus a-z, without the letter "l" -- easy to type without having to work the shift key up and down, as with so many URL shorteners.
The use of lowecase only makes them easy to read out over the phone and remembered for short periods of a few seconds -- for example,
wiki.org/31z8f2
can be read out as "wiki.org three one zed eight f two". For added goodness, case could be ignored, and "L" interpreted as "1", to further reduce the impact of mis-reading the tokens.
-- Neil