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Alex Brollo

18 Feb 2012 18 Feb '12

1:32 p.m.

Is there a sound reason to hidden so well the main id of pages? Is there any drawback to show it anywhere into wikies, and to use it much largely for links and API calls? Alex brollo

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Bináris

18 Feb 18 Feb

1:51 p.m.

2012/2/18 Alex Brollo <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com>

Is there a sound reason to hidden so well the main id of pages? Is there any drawback to show it anywhere into wikies, and to use it much largely for links and API calls? Deleting and restoring/recreating results in a new id, and pages take

their id upon renaming; is the id still useful for linking with these limitations? I just ask it because it is not perfectly clean for me what you mean by that. -- Bináris

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John Erling Blad

2:09 p.m.

In some cases it would be better to linke on article ids than their names, something like http://en.wikipedia.org/aid/123456 One example is as a link to an article in Wikipedia from tweet posted through the Twitter API. John On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Bináris <wikiposta(a)gmail.com> wrote:

2012/2/18 Alex Brollo <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com>

Is there a sound reason to hidden so well the main id of pages? Is there any drawback to show it anywhere into wikies, and to use it much largely for links and API calls? Deleting and restoring/recreating results in a new id, and pages take

their id upon renaming; is the id still useful for linking with these limitations? I just ask it because it is not perfectly clean for me what you mean by that. -- Bináris _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Petr Onderka

2:16 p.m.

You can do that, only the URL is slightly longer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2312711 Although I don't understand what would be the benefit of doing that. Petr Onderka [[User:Svick]] On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 14:09, John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com> wrote:

In some cases it would be better to linke on article ids than their names, something like http://en.wikipedia.org/aid/123456 One example is as a link to an article in Wikipedia from tweet posted through the Twitter API. John On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Bináris <wikiposta(a)gmail.com> wrote:

2012/2/18 Alex Brollo <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com>

Is there a sound reason to hidden so well the main id of pages? Is there any drawback to show it anywhere into wikies, and to use it much largely for links and API calls? Deleting and restoring/recreating results in a new id, and pages take

their id upon renaming; is the id still useful for linking with these limitations? I just ask it because it is not perfectly clean for me what you mean by that. -- Bináris _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

_______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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John Erling Blad

2:36 p.m.

Yes I know you can do that, and in fact its what I do right now. The problem is that a few extra chars has a lot of impact in Twitter. A betetr approach would be if it was legal to write something like wikipedia.org/en/123456789 (26 chars) compared to en.wikipedia.org/aid/123456789 (30 chars) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=123456789 (44 chars). To get around the problem I use bit.ly for a bot, but its a bit stupid to not handle this in wikipedia itself. John On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 2:16 PM, Petr Onderka <gsvick(a)gmail.com> wrote:

You can do that, only the URL is slightly longer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2312711 Although I don't understand what would be the benefit of doing that. Petr Onderka [[User:Svick]] On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 14:09, John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com> wrote:

In some cases it would be better to linke on article ids than their names, something like http://en.wikipedia.org/aid/123456 One example is as a link to an article in Wikipedia from tweet posted through the Twitter API. John On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Bináris <wikiposta(a)gmail.com> wrote:

2012/2/18 Alex Brollo <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com>

Is there a sound reason to hidden so well the main id of pages? Is there any drawback to show it anywhere into wikies, and to use it much largely for links and API calls? Deleting and restoring/recreating results in a new id, and pages take

their id upon renaming; is the id still useful for linking with these limitations? I just ask it because it is not perfectly clean for me what you mean by that. -- Bináris _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

_______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Alex Brollo

3:56 p.m.

Thanks! I'll save this talk as a reference. Really my question was focused on possibile risks or safety issues; it's so strange that a database (since I see wikisource as a database) is mainly indexed, from the user's point of view, on a variable field as title of the page, that I suspected some serious safety issue. And - strangely enough - id is not shown at all into pages, nor there's any magic word or other user friendly method to get it.

From a practical point of view, many from wikisource page titles are very

long, often they use non-ascii characters and mixtures of capitalized and not capitalized characters, they can't be used as they are as local file names... in brief, I feel all this stuff almost as annoying as the apostophes used in wiki markup for bold and italic. ;-) Alex

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[[w:en:User:Madman]]

19 Feb 19 Feb

12:38 a.m.

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 8:36 AM, John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Yes I know you can do that, and in fact its what I do right now. The problem is that a few extra chars has a lot of impact in Twitter. A betetr approach would be if it was legal to write something like wikipedia.org/en/123456789 (26 chars) compared to en.wikipedia.org/aid/123456789 (30 chars) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=123456789 (44 chars). To get around the problem I use bit.ly for a bot, but its a bit stupid to not handle this in wikipedia itself.

This seems moot to me because it's handled in *Twitter* itself. All URLs in a tweet are converted to t.co shortcuts that are twenty characters long (while abbreviated versions of the destination URLs should be shown when the tweet is viewed). More information is here: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/14…. Madman

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John Erling Blad

7:10 a.m.

Some of the urls to Wikipedia will fail when converted by the mechanism in Twitter, so you either must use the ugly url in the tweet or use a short url. Because you usually want to control the overall length you must convert it to a short url before you know how long it will be. In my opinion it wold be better if there was a simple way to generate short urls that also identified Wikipedia as such. John On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 12:38 AM, [[w:en:User:Madman]] <madman.enwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 8:36 AM, John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Yes I know you can do that, and in fact its what I do right now. The problem is that a few extra chars has a lot of impact in Twitter. A betetr approach would be if it was legal to write something like wikipedia.org/en/123456789 (26 chars) compared to en.wikipedia.org/aid/123456789 (30 chars) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=123456789 (44 chars). To get around the problem I use bit.ly for a bot, but its a bit stupid to not handle this in wikipedia itself.

This seems moot to me because it's handled in *Twitter* itself. All URLs in a tweet are converted to t.co shortcuts that are twenty characters long (while abbreviated versions of the destination URLs should be shown when the tweet is viewed). More information is here: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/14…. Madman _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Sumana Harihareswara

2:49 p.m.

On 02/19/2012 01:10 AM, John Erling Blad wrote:

Some of the urls to Wikipedia will fail when converted by the mechanism in Twitter, so you either must use the ugly url in the tweet or use a short url. Because you usually want to control the overall length you must convert it to a short url before you know how long it will be. In my opinion it wold be better if there was a simple way to generate short urls that also identified Wikipedia as such. John

There is an extension for this: ShortURL: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ShortUrl It's being reviewed and prepared for deployment on Wikimedia wikis: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1450 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Review_queue -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Leonard Wallentin

20 Feb 20 Feb

12:23 p.m.

In my opinion it wold be better if there was a simple way to generate short urls that also identified Wikipedia as such. John

There is an extension for this: ShortURL: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ShortUrl

I just tried that out with an external domain on my wiki, and it works very well: sasm.at/244 (11 characters) will now redirect to säsongsmat.nu/ssm/Recept:Sl%C3%A5nb%C3%A4rssaft_%C3%A0_la_Gusem%C3%A5la (71 characters) If someone wants to use it the same way, I wrote a short tutorial here: http://blog.xn--ssongsmat-v2a.nu/2012/02/20/creating-a-url-shortener-with-m… Leo Wallentin

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Brion Vibber

21 Feb 21 Feb

7:15 p.m.

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 5:49 AM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org

wrote:

On 02/19/2012 01:10 AM, John Erling Blad wrote:

Some of the urls to Wikipedia will fail when converted by the mechanism in Twitter, so you either must use the ugly url in the tweet or use a short url. Because you usually want to control the overall length you must convert it to a short url before you know how long it will be. In my opinion it wold be better if there was a simple way to generate short urls that also identified Wikipedia as such.

There is an extension for this: ShortURL: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ShortUrl

ShortUrl actually works by assigning a new ID number to represent a *page title*. This means that shortened links to a particular title will survive deletion/undeletion etc, and they still rely on redirects to handle page renames and things. I proposed using page id instead, but being a title-equivalent makes a lot of sense for linking since it'll retain the same semantics as linking with the full title URL. IIRC this ext was originally devised for the Indic-language wikis, which tend to have vvvveeeerrrryyyy long illegible URLs because of the way characters are encoded (nine characters of URL for each character of title!). -- brion

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MZMcBride

19 Feb 19 Feb

12:30 a.m.

John Erling Blad wrote:

In some cases it would be better to linke on article ids than their names, something like http://en.wikipedia.org/aid/123456 One example is as a link to an article in Wikipedia from tweet posted through the Twitter API.

People interested in prettier URLs should follow these bugs: * https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/1450 * https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/16659 * https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/17981 MZMcBride

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Bergi

18 Feb 18 Feb

2:19 p.m.

Alex Brollo schrieb:

Is there a sound reason to hidden so well the main id of pages? Is there any drawback to show it anywhere into wikies, and to use it much largely for links and API calls?

Not for API calls, but for links. For the API you can use mw.config.get("wgArticleId") without problems, but there are some downsides to use the page ID in regular links: * a link should show the page title, not just a intransparent number * pretty urls, see also http://www.mediawiki.org/?curid=2852 (???) * the id may stay consistent when moving a page, but that should be done with redirects. But when a page was deleted, having only the uri (http://de.wikipedia.org/?curid=6770594) won't help you anything ("invalid title"). But visiting http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taurmina, you will see at least the deletion log. There was also a discussion at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Projektdiskussion/WP_-_Teil_des_www, since then we have a gadget in deWP to show a secont permanent link with curid. For technical documentation you may have a look at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL. Regards, Bergi

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12 comments

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participants (10)

[[w:en:User:Madman]]
Alex Brollo
Bergi
Bináris
Brion Vibber
John Erling Blad
Leonard Wallentin
MZMcBride
Petr Onderka
Sumana Harihareswara