[Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: Do WMF want enwp.org?]

Nihiltres wiki.nihiltres at gmail.com
Wed May 11 19:22:19 UTC 2011


(Please pardon my not quoting earlier emails)

I think a URL shortener is a great idea if we can make it work right.
We do need, however, to sort out our issues, e.g. the following list:

*Choice of domain name(s) (or a TLD)
**Acquisition of domain name(s)
**Registration of TLD (if applicable)
**Maintenance and admin. of the above, including costs
**Length of domain name/TLD
*Implementation of URL shortening
**Namespacing for projects/languages
**Whether to encode pagenames/IDs/etc.
**How to encode pagenames/IDs/etc.

I'm not particularly familiar with the process for TLDs, and I don't
mind the choice of domain much as long as it's short, but I pondered
Wikimedia URL shorteners one day and came up with the following system
for a Wikimedia URL shortening service:

*The domain wi.ki (at 5 characters, it's among the shortest, and is
very obvious despite the problematic "wiki" vs. "Wikimedia" confusion)
*First, a base 64 encoded ID number for project and language. This has
the advantage of fitting up to 4096 projects before needing three
characters, and would allow some of the most heavily-used wikis to use
only one character for their ID. One potential snag is that we would
want to substitute other characters for "a" and "A" in this area so
that the URL didn't start with http://wi.ki/a/ and confuse us with
Wikia.
*Next, a slash to separate the project number from the page number.
*Next, a base 64 encoded revision ID. By using the revision ID to
determine the target page, we get around the problem of page-moves,
and we could add the option of adding a control character (e.g. +) at
the end to make a permanent link to that particular revision, an
option that many proposals don't allow for.
*An ideal implementation would allow one to prepend a control
character to use a transparent link.

Thus, we'd have links something like these:
http://wi.ki/0/ZXh8g
http://wi.ki/0/ZXh8g+
http://wi.ki/0/+Foobar

In the above examples, the first would go to [[w:en:Foobar]], the
second to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Foobar&oldid=425598752
, and the third again to [[w:en:Foobar]] but in a more transparent
way. "Foobar" might be a bad example, since the title itself is so
short that encoding it doesn't save many characters.


Nihiltres



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