On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 18:01:58 +0100, Tels nospam-abuse@bloodgate.com wrote:
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=...]]).
No, simple fix: don't redirect URLs with "/" in them. That would not allow a redirect for the article "skins/scans", but articles with "/" in them are probably in the minority.
Well, as I said "While we could have all sorts of exceptions and rearrangements and special cases, it would be an absolute maintenance nightmare".
But to be more specific, the fact that such names are in the *minority* doesn't make any difference - if short URLs of this form were to be considered "correct" and even "normal", as people are suggesting, they would have to *always* work. Otherwise, people would just be extremely confused when they typed one in which *didn't* work - if they were never redirected to the longer form (or, arguably, if they didn't notice it, as with the former setup) they would have no idea what was wrong with the address they'd typed.
In fact, without the check for "/", the redirect would also redirect "/wiki/article" to "/wiki/wiki/article", so it must be already in place..
No, because this isn't actually a rewrite rule (as Alfio quite reasonably guessed) but a 404 handler, for when people enter a URL that doesn't exist. So no exceptions of this kind are needed, because those URLs *do* exist (in as much as they are handled by the wiki scripts).
One could also say that only wiki articles should live under the en.wikipedia.org namespace and everything else should be somewhere else, like files.wikipedia.org or skins.wikipedia.org etc.
Yes, that would certainly be a possibilty - but note that each sub-domain has its own installation of the MediaWiki software, so unless we had sub-sub-domains, like skins.en.wikipedia.org (which would make administering DNS that much harder), this would probably require some pretty major changes to the code to use some "common" repository - including some way of handling the exceptions where things *need* to be different, etc.
What's more, this still wouldn't deal with the issue of URLs like .../w/index.php, which are inherently both project-dependent and part of the core code. What's more, these aren't just used within the software, but are extensively linked to externally, so any rearrangement would have to leave them working as expected. Like I say, any exception you make is going to be very confusing as soon as somebody tries it expecting the opposite behaviour.