Hello,
This is a feature suggestion. I also submitted it through Mediazilla (#1450). (It could be that something like this was already proposed, I just haven't found it).
It is nice to see what the URL is pointing to in English (or any ASCII-7 based alphabet). Unfortunately, it is not the case for most other languages. For most of them, especially for the languages which are not based on Latin alphabet, URL-escaping makes URL unreadable and very very long. So, it would be nice to have some kind of short URLs for wikipedia pages. This will make it easier for the user to copy and paste the short URL into e-mail or on the web page. (I saw the reference to the wikipedia article in Russian in e-mail -- it is horrible: 3 lines of 80 chars each, absolutely unreadable).
The short URL itself could be something like this:
http://www.wiki???????.org/u/xyzuv
where
????? is a project name ({m,p}edia, etc) u is a special prefix (may be empty); xyzuv is an "encoded" form of longer URL (very much like tinyurl.com's one).
It also would be nice to have this short URL on the printed page (as text, as well as a link).
As a side-effect, the bots on #XXrc-channel will be less verbose. We, at #ru.wikipedia, are using such short URLs, they seem more practical, and overall impression is better, than while using wprc-bots directly.
Shorter URLs, happier users.
Best regards,
On Wednesday 02 February 2005 08:24, DIG wrote:
The short URL itself could be something like this:
The code that does this job exists and it is GPL, so it can be incorporated in MW easily: The code lies in the Drupal CMS where every node can be accessed via a number/code and optionally a full name (full URL).
Like this:
On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 08:56:20AM +0200, NSK wrote:
On Wednesday 02 February 2005 08:24, DIG wrote:
The short URL itself could be something like this:
The code that does this job exists and it is GPL, so it can be incorporated in MW easily: The code lies in the Drupal CMS where every node can be accessed via a number/code and optionally a full name (full URL).
I am not familiar with drupal. What is the mechanism they use for automatically generate shorten URLs and to keep them consistent in time (we need to make sure that these short URL will live long enough, virtually forever)?
It could be some kind of hash of article's title. This way it will be reasonably unique, and it can be kept in the database. Then, when the short URL is requested, the corresponding value substitutes the shorten URL.
Best regards,
DIG schrieb:
It could be some kind of hash of article's title. This way it will be reasonably unique, and it can be kept in the database. Then, when the short URL is requested, the corresponding value substitutes the shorten URL.
That wouldn't help when renaming/moving articles. To my mind the most straightforward solution would be to access the article by it's database id which is both short _and_ (project wise) unique. Naturally you need some special syntax for that to avoid overlapping with articles that have numerical titles.
Ciao, Michael.
On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 08:47:21AM +0100, Michael Keppler wrote:
That wouldn't help when renaming/moving articles. To my mind the most straightforward solution would be to access the article by it's database id which is both short _and_ (project wise) unique. Naturally you need some special syntax for that to avoid overlapping with articles that have numerical titles.
If the article is renamed, and there is no redirection from old place -- then this article is gone. So that's OK, if short URL will be transformed into non-existent article (with the standard "Would you like to create this article?" message).
The short URL should be associated with the name of article, not with its content.
Best regards,
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org