[WikiEN-l] NY Times: Wired Editor Apologizes for Copying from Wikipedia in New Book

[Joseph Reagle]

On Thursday 25 June 2009, Andrew Gray wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view&oldid=6042007
> 
> can be rendered as
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=6042007
> 
> Can we make that even more succinct? Well, we could take a leaf from
> the DOI playbook, and set up something like:
> 
> http://[site]/wp:en/6042007

So the oldid's are globally unique (among a language subdomain)? If that's the case, the answer to Charles' question of how hard it is could be not hard at all. (Perhaps even doable with some simple Apache rewrites, but WP is a complex architecture.)

As an aside the MARC archivists we're very helpful to me so that I could easily cite conversations on this list by creating a email msgid referrer. So for example, one of Charles' earlier messages is:

http://marc.info/?i=4A433110.2000606@ntlworld.com

dereferences to:

http://marc.info/?l=wikien-l&m=124591771510938

Granted, the msgid version is slightly longer, but it's stable (a lot of archives regenerate and break links) and corresponds to the thing in my mbox. Similar tricks can be done for identifiers. (At the W3C, we used shorter URIs to define algorithms, schema, and namespaces with the rewrite approach.)