2009/3/14 Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com:
IIRC one reason to use wiki/ and w/ instead of "direct" URLs (en.wikipedia.org/Xenu) was to allow for non-article data at a later time (the other reason was to set noindex/nofollow rules). Looks like we will use that space after all :-)
That may be one reason, but I think the main reason is to avoid problems with articles called things like "index.php". /wiki/ is a dummy directory, there's nothing actually there to conflict with, the root directory has real files in it that need to accessible.