Alex Brollo schrieb:
Is there a sound reason to hidden so well the main id of pages? Is there any drawback to show it anywhere into wikies, and to use it much largely for links and API calls?
Not for API calls, but for links. For the API you can use mw.config.get("wgArticleId") without problems, but there are some downsides to use the page ID in regular links: * a link should show the page title, not just a intransparent number * pretty urls, see also http://www.mediawiki.org/?curid=2852 (???) * the id may stay consistent when moving a page, but that should be done with redirects. But when a page was deleted, having only the uri (http://de.wikipedia.org/?curid=6770594) won't help you anything ("invalid title"). But visiting http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taurmina, you will see at least the deletion log.
There was also a discussion at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Projektdiskussion/WP_-_Teil_des_www, since then we have a gadget in deWP to show a secont permanent link with curid. For technical documentation you may have a look at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL.
Regards, Bergi