On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:55:51 -0500, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
In the long-term, why should there be such things? If
something is not
a wiki page, it shouldn't be using part of the public URL-space on
en.wikipedia.org. Such things could be hosted at e.g.
skins.wikipedia.org, or
skins.wikipedia.org/en/ if they must be
localized. There already is such a place for images (Wikimedia Commons).
Let me paste a URL from another tab of my browser:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Googlepedia&action=edit
Is that a wiki page? Yes. Is it of the form <server>/wiki/<pagename>?
No. Is there any logic to farming it off to some other domain? No. It
is, always has been, and always should be "using part of the public
URL-space on en.wikipedia.org".
Or consider an address like
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Googlepedia&diff=10548376&…
- the kind of address that people frequently bookmark, refer to in
discussions, e-mails, external websites, etc. Hence, the kind of
address that it would be extremely foolish to break by rearranging the
URL-space.
Sorry if this comes across as rather rude, I'm just fed up of
repeating the same argument again and again because people haven't
understood it. Let me summarise:
* there are things in the URL-space of, e.g.,
en.wikipedia.org that
are not wiki pages
* some of these, such as elements of the skins, are or should be only
referenced internally, and would therefore be safe to move
* some, however, such as the scripts in the /w/ directory are
extensively referenced in all sorts of external contexts, and
therefore *must* be retained with their current function
* there is no guarantee what URLs the software will need in the
future, and whether they will need to be externally referencable
* it would be possible to create a redirection system with exceptions
for all the things which aren't wiki pages; wiki pages conflicting
with those exceptions would then be inaccessible via that redirection
system
* in order for people to then access such pages, there would need to
be a longer URL format that was not prone to these conflicts
* people would need to know what those longer URLs were
* the software would need to generate those longer URLs, because
unlike a human it couldn't check and then go "oh, maybe I need the
longer form"
* therefore, the longer URLs would have to be considered, as they
always have been, the "correct" and "normal" form
* the 404 handler in its current state does exactly this, by
redirecting people, but informing them that they are being redirected.
Like I say, I do apologise for getting frustrated about this; I do
realise that if people misunderstand me, it's as likely my fault as
theirs.
One final thought is that for particular things like the Foundation
website, invisible redirects could be created *on a case-by-case
basis* so that URLs like
http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
could be given out as "official" URLs (or for cases where they already
have been). The Foundation site is an exception, in the sense that to
most users it is a static site on which they can look up information;
only for a few people is it usable as a wiki (i.e. edittable). It
therefore seems unnatural to have key URLs containning the word
"wiki".
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]