On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:55:51 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
In the long-term, why should there be such things? If something is not a wiki page, it shouldn't be using part of the public URL-space on en.wikipedia.org. Such things could be hosted at e.g. skins.wikipedia.org, or skins.wikipedia.org/en/ if they must be localized. There already is such a place for images (Wikimedia Commons).
Let me paste a URL from another tab of my browser: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Googlepedia&action=edit Is that a wiki page? Yes. Is it of the form <server>/wiki/<pagename>? No. Is there any logic to farming it off to some other domain? No. It is, always has been, and always should be "using part of the public URL-space on en.wikipedia.org".
Or consider an address like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Googlepedia&diff=10548376&... - the kind of address that people frequently bookmark, refer to in discussions, e-mails, external websites, etc. Hence, the kind of address that it would be extremely foolish to break by rearranging the URL-space.
Sorry if this comes across as rather rude, I'm just fed up of repeating the same argument again and again because people haven't understood it. Let me summarise:
* there are things in the URL-space of, e.g., en.wikipedia.org that are not wiki pages
* some of these, such as elements of the skins, are or should be only referenced internally, and would therefore be safe to move * some, however, such as the scripts in the /w/ directory are extensively referenced in all sorts of external contexts, and therefore *must* be retained with their current function * there is no guarantee what URLs the software will need in the future, and whether they will need to be externally referencable
* it would be possible to create a redirection system with exceptions for all the things which aren't wiki pages; wiki pages conflicting with those exceptions would then be inaccessible via that redirection system * in order for people to then access such pages, there would need to be a longer URL format that was not prone to these conflicts * people would need to know what those longer URLs were * the software would need to generate those longer URLs, because unlike a human it couldn't check and then go "oh, maybe I need the longer form" * therefore, the longer URLs would have to be considered, as they always have been, the "correct" and "normal" form * the 404 handler in its current state does exactly this, by redirecting people, but informing them that they are being redirected.
Like I say, I do apologise for getting frustrated about this; I do realise that if people misunderstand me, it's as likely my fault as theirs.
One final thought is that for particular things like the Foundation website, invisible redirects could be created *on a case-by-case basis* so that URLs like http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising could be given out as "official" URLs (or for cases where they already have been). The Foundation site is an exception, in the sense that to most users it is a static site on which they can look up information; only for a few people is it usable as a wiki (i.e. edittable). It therefore seems unnatural to have key URLs containning the word "wiki".