On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 5:49 AM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah@wikimedia.org
wrote:
On 02/19/2012 01:10 AM, John Erling Blad wrote:
Some of the urls to Wikipedia will fail when converted by the mechanism in Twitter, so you either must use the ugly url in the tweet or use a short url. Because you usually want to control the overall length you must convert it to a short url before you know how long it will be.
In my opinion it wold be better if there was a simple way to generate short urls that also identified Wikipedia as such.
There is an extension for this: ShortURL:
ShortUrl actually works by assigning a new ID number to represent a *page title*. This means that shortened links to a particular title will survive deletion/undeletion etc, and they still rely on redirects to handle page renames and things.
I proposed using page id instead, but being a title-equivalent makes a lot of sense for linking since it'll retain the same semantics as linking with the full title URL.
IIRC this ext was originally devised for the Indic-language wikis, which tend to have vvvveeeerrrryyyy long illegible URLs because of the way characters are encoded (nine characters of URL for each character of title!).
-- brion