Rowan Collins wrote:
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.
This part's actually not really true. We have a single installation of MediaWiki, and about a half-dozen copies of the base docroot which consist of a few identical symlinks and a couple different ones.
Hypothetically we could move some of the skin files etc to a subdomain... but we could never eliminate a few things things like robots.txt or the script itself, and we need to maintain the previous standard URLs as valid entry points. Exceptions aren't tenable for all-inclusive projects like ours, particularly not for the canonical URLs.
My preference has been to merge the language domains to get URLs like this:
http://wikipedia.org/en/Foobar http://wiktionary.org/la/imperium
and perhaps things like this: http://wikipedia.org/edit/fr/Nice http://wikipedia.org/history/fr/Nice?from=200411112117 http://wikipedia.org/revision/fr/1063501
But we haven't got round to that yet. I've added some preliminary support for 'action URLs' to the 1.5 code to allow prettifying the non-view actions (edit, history, etc).
But we cannot and will not have canonical or standard URLs like this, ever:
http://en.wiktionary.org/robots.txt <- is this a dictionary entry or the robots exclusion file??
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)