* Srikanth Lakshmanan srik.lak@gmail.com [Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:29:33 +0530]:
Hi all,
Sharing of URLs of non latin wiki's werent really easy and when copy pasting we get the unicode numerals in the URL like
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E...
en:User:Mountain had come up with a shortify project[1] and thanks to Yuvipanda its now live on Tamil Wikipedia. All pages have a link on
the
right side of article title. http://tawp.in/r/262 is the same link and is being displayed there. The feedback from the community is to have this hosted by Wikimedia itself as it would be more reliable than
individual
running it. So there came the idea of a mediawiki extension and hence Shorturl extension[2] was born by some really quick work by Yuvipanda.Its live here[3].(See the toolbox for short URL) While this may be a small thing, it does help non latin wiki's a lot.Having it in the extension form is more reliable even though the URL length goes up, but still its worthy.The URL length can be shortened with mod_rewrite rules on. I would ideally like this to be used across non latin wikimedia properties as
it
helps these projects(like echoed here[4]). Please let me know how to
do
this. Bugs on wikimedia bugzilla will do?
Feedback appreciated.
I wish the numerous http and mail clients as well as web engines were able to display such links "urldecoded", like Firefox does. I've made such patch for MediaWiki https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25934 However, phpbb didn't decode such links, IE6/7/8 not as well :-( A lots of software and web engines probably has to be updated to recognize the utf-8 URI's. Dmitriy