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

[Shiju Alex]

Happy to note that more communities started thinking about this issue. I
remember raising this issue way back in 2009 or early 2010.  But there were
not much takers then.


> Happy to announce that Short URLs are now available in every page of Tamil
>
Wikipedia.
>

Need to do some UI testing. For example, see this
article<http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%87%E0%AE%B2%E0%AE%99%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%88>.
We (Malayalam wikimedians) found several use cases like this when we
customized pretty url for Malayalam

It would be great if this can be supported by Wikimedia itself.
>

That is a good suggestion Srikath. This type of solution is required in all
non-latin wikis. In fact it is required even for some Latin wiki articles
including English. For example, see this article from German wiki.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%84

I understand Malayalam wikipedia has a redirect mechanism based on the
>
english interwiki title for sometime now.
>

That is a wrong assumption. It is not just copy paste of English URL. If we
were doing like that, what will happen to these type of articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica. It is again out
with some ugly characters.

Even though Malayalam community was aware about the solution that Srikath
provided, there are several reason for not going for it. Santhosh has
already pointed out some of the major reasons. So not elaborating it more.
But we have solution for the problem Srikanth mentioned right from late
2006.


ts just a template, but the problem is one needs to run a bot for all
> existing articles to add the template with a fancy name.But ml wiki is
> primarily using english names, transliterated text to form pretty urls. Just
> as i type, Santhosh replied. More on another reply.
>

In fact redirect pages are very much required for each wiki article. We
never know what all keywords people will use to search for wiki articles.
All the possible keywords should be made redirects.

Think about people who come to wiki only for reading. They have so many
obstacles to reach a particular wiki article. if we are able to understand
this, we will be able to develop different solutions for them. That is why
we developed many solutions including pretty url.

[4]
> http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%AB%E0%B4%B2%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%82:Prettyurl --
> Its funny, prettyurl template extension url isnt pretty :P
>

The reason is, it contains localized namespace. But you have solution there
also: http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Prettyurl

If am going to pretty URL solution (which has its advantages on readable
> URLs) I would need to run a bot and do a lot of work for 29000+ articles. :)
>

In fact if you are not creating the redirect page *India* for the article
இந்தியா<http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%87%E0%AE%A8%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%AF%E0%AE%BE>in
Tamil wiki, then that is very bad from reader's perspective. Yesterday
I
was introducing Tamil wiki to one of my tamil friend. The first word he
typed in search box was *India*. We can't expect people to know typing in
Tamil when they come there only for reading. Same case applies to all
articles across various Indian language wikis.

But create only those redirect pages that make sense.

Shiju



On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:39 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Santhosh,
>
> Thanks for the reply. Yes, I know it doesnt help people identify the text.
> This was chosen for people to conveniently share on twitter. As Subhashish
> pointed out, people are anyway using bit.ly etc and we are getting into an
> era where people click URLs based on the comment preceeding it and not on
> the URL itself(Atleast in twitter). Other reason i opted this is because,
> its quicker to release. If am going to pretty URL solution (which has its
> advantages on readable URLs) I would need to run a bot and do a lot of work
> for 29000+ articles. :)
>
> Yes, SEO on a seperate thread please. Am replying :)
>
> Regards
> Srikanth.L
> http://srik.me
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 23:31, Santhosh Thottingal <
> santhosh.thottingal at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> URL shortners will not improve the search hits.
>> The above solution allows one to share the non latin wiki url using
>> English alphabets and Arabic numerals. Personally I would prefer a URL
>> I can remember and it should help me to identify to where it is
>> pointing without clicking on it.
>> http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango clearly tells me that it is a
>> Malayalam wiki page about Mango
>> http://tawp.in/r/262 does not give that information to me. But that is
>> just a personal comment.
>>
>> Srikanth mentioned a valid issue related to search engine optimization
>> with Indian wikis. I dont get any result for this query:
>> "Malayalam + Mango "  to take me to Mango article in Malayalam wiki.
>> Because there is no way a search engine can index the word Mango in
>> english to the Malayalam wiki page of Mango. Having Mango in URL does
>> not help search engines.
>> I know some SEO tricks used by Malayalam news portals to address this.
>> They use Meta tag efficiently and put english and malayalam keywords
>> associated with the article. For eg: a news article about
>> Mullapperiyar Dam will contain a meta tag with keywords
>> "മുല്ലപ്പെരിയാര്‍ ഡാം, mullapperiyar dam, "
>> Some of the news portals even integrated this trick their news
>> publishing workflow with custom plugins to CMS systems(like Drupal).
>>
>> If we want to get people searching in English to our wiki articles, we
>> can think about a Meta tag solution - some extension that injects
>> keywords to meta tag.
>>
>> Don't we need to point show ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochi if one search
>> for Kochi? atleast within first 10 results?
>>
>> (Sorry if I hijacked the thread, we may start another thread if we
>> want to discuss this further)
>>
>> Thanks
>> Santhosh
>>
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