John Beckett wrote:
A.J.Mechelynck wrote:
Wouldn't it be enough to set up the main tip page with a
tip _name_ (which would be the current "title" of the tip, or
a disambiguation page if there are more than one tip with the
same title), and have the tip _number_ (only for tips imported
from Vim-online) refer to a redirect page, let's say "Vim tip
1" => "The super star"? So the conversion script could convert
"vimtip#1" to "[[Vim tip 1]]", which could be done
mechanically, and the redirect would automagically resend
anyone clicking that link to the actual page. I suppose that
links pointing to the redirect pages could be readjusted
later, in no hurry, either by hand or by a "wiki robot", and
in either case with the help of the "What points here" page
for the redirect.
Would someone who understands wiki procedures please describe
how the URL for a tip would be generated. What is actually
achievable? Can a URL be changed later without much effort?
I propose using just the title as it already exists in the tip, e.g. "The
super star" (see below about spaces). In addition, a page titled "Vim tip 1"
would also be created, with only the line
#REDIRECT [[The super star]]
so that trying to get that page would normally automatically go to the other
one. The conversion script, when finding the text "vimtip#1" (used by the
vim-online tips to generate links to each other) would translate it to "[[Vim
tip 1]]" (without the quotes) which is an internal link in wikicode. Later,
someone (or maybe some wiki robot) could check the "What points here" page for
the redirection page, and change everywhere [[Vim tip 1]] to [[The super star]].
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet (and, possibly, what it
links to) for Wikipedia editing help.
Can we have a redirect as Tony outlines above?
I proposed devising a short id for each tip (like "super_star"
for tip 1), then using that tip_id in the URL.
That would avoid ugly URLs which would wrap in an email, or
which would contain stuff like %20, making the URL hard to read.
%20 are never necessary because spaces are replaced by underscores in the URL:
when the title of a wiki page is "The super star" the URL is
(something)/The_super_star where (something)/ depends on the wiki, e.g.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ for the English wikipedia or
http://kb.mozillazine.org/ for the Mozillazine knowledge base. %28 or %29
might appear if there are parentheses in the title, but only when referring to
a wiki page from outside the wiki: e.g. the "Vim (text editor)" page of the
English wikipedia is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29 from
outside the wiki, but it is referred to as [[Vim (text editor)]] within the
wiki, and (when equipped with the Wikipedia (en) search plugin) typing "Vim
(text editor)" (without the quotes) in the Firefox 2 search bar finds it (I
just tried it). Some Fx2 search plugins can also be used with Fx1.5, others
can also be used with IE7, I'm not sure to which category this one belongs.
Is my concern (that we should avoid long ugly URLs) misguided?
John
Best regards,
Tony.
--
The idea is to die young as late as possible.
-- Ashley Montague
