David Gerard wrote: > On 11 February 2011 11:30, Mingli Yuan <[email protected]> wrote: >> So I just want to know the possibility that foundation can support it or not? >> And how should I improve the work to make foundation accept this service? > > A URL shortener is a very good idea.
In general, URL shorteners are a terrible idea. They often rely on third-party services, so at any point the links could put a pay wall or ads in between click and target (or worse, stop working completely). They also generally greatly reduce the value of a URL. They're good for spammers, though. > Even for English, there's http://enwp.org for instance. English > Wikinews has http://enwn.net . Neither of these is official. These are a little better because even if enwp.org dies or becomes a different kind of site, it's possible to know what someone intended when they wrote "enwp.org/foo". > But maybe having an official shortener would be a good idea. Maybe. It would at least mitigate the risk of a third-party going belly up. A lot of organizations are using their own short URLs for this reason (nytim.es and the like). That said, every page has a page ID (curid) and a revision ID (oldid): * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable * http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=411553662 * http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20036 These can be made even shorter: * http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=411553662 * http://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=20036 Drawbacks to this are that using IDs instead of titles decreases the value of the URLs and "curid" (a reference to the internal page.page_id) can change if a page is deleted/undeleted. There are also interactions with redirects and page moves to consider. It largely depends on what the use-case for having such a short URL is going to be and how many costs are worth those benefits. The use-cases still seem rather confined to me, while the overhead to setting up and maintaining such a service is not negligible. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
