On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 09:04:02 +0000 (UTC), Walter Vermeir walter@wikipedia.be wrote:
Can the /wiki/ part not be removed removed completely form the url?
No. As Brion rightly points out, there are, and always will be, URLs for things other than wiki pages. If, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/skins was the URL of a wiki page called "skins", where would the files (CSS, images, etc) for displaying the skin be stored? And even more so, if http://en.wikipedia.org/w referred to the article [[w]], all the URLs of the form http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=... would instantly break (in fact, they would point to pages called things like [[w/index.php?title=...]]).
While we could have all sorts of exceptions and rearrangements and special cases, it would be an absolute maintenance nightmare, so I agree with Brion that these short URLs should be considered "incorrect" even if they work most of the time.