On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 5:49 AM, Sumana Harihareswara <suma...@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: > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension: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 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
