On 8/11/06, Nick Jenkins nickpj@gmail.com wrote:
Look, I'm not trying to be obtuse, but I sincerely think that a redirect is better, and pointing to corner-cases as a reason not to make things better in the general-case doesn't make much sense to me.
It makes sense because there's practically no cost to the alternative that avoids such corner cases. People will rarely leave out the /wiki/ part, because they'll learn that it gets them the soft redirect, but if they don't leave it out there's no harm anyway, and so we don't have to worry about the corner cases.
This is especially important in the context of any kind of automated procedure — say if someone writes a Firefox extension that will give you the appropriate Wikipedia page for selected text from a context menu, and sees that the shorter URL works. Out of thousands of people looking up tons of stuff every day, somebody's going to become totally confused at some point — some things, like "wiki", aren't as minor as robots.txt.
Frankly, I think it makes pretty much no difference, but we may as well stay on the safe side.