[Wikimediaindia-l] URL Shortener in Tamil Wikipedia + URLs for Indic Wikipedia

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

Hi all,

Happy to announce that Short URLs are now available in every page of Tamil
Wikipedia. Sharing Indic URLs with unicode characters are never fun since
one will get an ugly looking URL like
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%AA%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%AA%E0%AF%80%E0%AE%9F%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%AF%E0%AE%BE:%E0%AE%86%E0%AE%B2%E0%AE%AE%E0%AE%B0%E0%AE%A4%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%9F%E0%AE%BF
.
(Forget about twitter, even mails are tough).Now its easier
http://tawp.in/r/262 !! The short url is visible on top right of every page,
extreme right of the article title. For the technically inclined, the
shortening happens by encoding the page id of a mediawiki page to base36 (No
database for shorturls here!) and hence doesnt depend on any other server.

I would like to thank User:Mountain[1] for the shortify project[2] which
powers this. (Gerard, this is already localized in tamil,malayalam :) ). It
would be great if this could be "extensionized" in mediawiki as its a
feature must for wiki's running in non latin languages.I would also like to
thank YuviPanda for setting this up on his server and doing some
customization for Tamil wiki. (YuviPanda is an ubergeek looking to do some
serious work for mediawiki in GSoC), Kishore for some quick css help in
making this happen.

It would be great if this can be supported by Wikimedia itself. Even if the
fancy twitter friendly short domain name is not there,if just the
redirection part is hosted for all projects on wikimedia servers(existing
domain names will do), it will be of great use, especially for non latin
languages.

I understand Malayalam wikipedia has a redirect mechanism based on the
english interwiki title for sometime now.Even we would want to do this, but
am thinking if redirects are an optimal, search engine friendly solution or
are there better ways of doing it.Can someone please educate me. Also IMHO
URLs with transliterated text will help Indic languages. But making them
search friendly is a key thing and if we could do this, am sure the
readership would bound to increase a few times.(Not everyone knows to type
in regional language and many use transliterated text for search and then
consume vernacular content). Wikipedia is missing them!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mountain
[2] https://github.com/mountain/shortify

Regards
Srikanth.L
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