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. John On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 12:38 AM, [[w:en:User:Madman]] <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 8:36 AM, John Erling Blad <[email protected]> wrote: >> Yes I know you can do that, and in fact its what I do right now. The >> problem is that a few extra chars has a lot of impact in Twitter. A >> betetr approach would be if it was legal to write something like >> wikipedia.org/en/123456789 (26 chars) compared to >> en.wikipedia.org/aid/123456789 (30 chars) or >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=123456789 (44 chars). To get around >> the problem I use bit.ly for a bot, but its a bit stupid to not handle >> this in wikipedia itself. > > This seems moot to me because it's handled in *Twitter* itself. All > URLs in a tweet are converted to t.co shortcuts that are twenty > characters long (while abbreviated versions of the destination URLs > should be shown when the tweet is viewed). More information is here: > http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/14d5474c13ed84aa. > > Madman > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
