[Foundation-l] Shorter Url for non-latin languages

[MZMcBride]

David Gerard wrote:
> On 11 February 2011 11:30, Mingli Yuan <mingli.yuan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So I just want to know the possibility that foundation can support it or not?
>> And how should I improve the work to make foundation accept this service?
> 
> A URL shortener is a very good idea.

In general, URL shorteners are a terrible idea. They often rely on
third-party services, so at any point the links could put a pay wall or ads
in between click and target (or worse, stop working completely). They also
generally greatly reduce the value of a URL. They're good for spammers,
though.

> Even for English, there's http://enwp.org for instance. English
> Wikinews has http://enwn.net . Neither of these is official.

These are a little better because even if enwp.org dies or becomes a
different kind of site, it's possible to know what someone intended when
they wrote "enwp.org/foo".

> But maybe having an official shortener would be a good idea.

Maybe. It would at least mitigate the risk of a third-party going belly up.
A lot of organizations are using their own short URLs for this reason
(nytim.es and the like). That said, every page has a page ID (curid) and a
revision ID (oldid):

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable
* http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=411553662
* http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20036

These can be made even shorter:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=411553662
* http://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=20036

Drawbacks to this are that using IDs instead of titles decreases the value
of the URLs and "curid" (a reference to the internal page.page_id) can
change if a page is deleted/undeleted. There are also interactions with
redirects and page moves to consider.

It largely depends on what the use-case for having such a short URL is going
to be and how many costs are worth those benefits. The use-cases still seem
rather confined to me, while the overhead to setting up and maintaining such
a service is not negligible.

MZMcBride