Speaking about shortening of URLs: diff=prev (which actually also gives the meaning of link for the first sight) can also be used to save some characters/bytes, so

http://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=5383355&diff=prev (Википедия:Викивстречи)

So counted all together with stuff in comment #0 the links could (or should?) look this way:

http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/?oldid=150852

for new page

http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/?oldid=5383355&diff=prev

for edit

Speaking about shortening of URLs: diff=prev (which actually also gives the
meaning of link for the first sight) can also be used to save some
characters/bytes

I thought about this too, but it may break the functionality of some IRC bots that may need the both version numbers. Article name can be taken in the beginning anyway, so that wouldn't hurt anyone.

In general, removing the titles would make the feeds near-useless for humans.

Using prettier encoding for non-latin chars might be nicer, though; they're pretty illegible as it is. :P :)

(In reply to comment #3)

In general, removing the titles would make the feeds near-useless for humans.

Why? The feed already contains the pagename in [[...]] and UTF encoded. The title parameter in URL is de facto duplicating of this wikilink-like title.

Ah, so it does. :) Objection withdrawn.

*** Bug 13033 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

gangleri wrote:

(In reply to comment #6)

> *** Bug 13033 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

(In reply to comment #4)

Why? The feed already contains the pagename in [[...]] and UTF encoded. The
title parameter in URL is de facto duplicating of this wikilink-like title.

bug 013033 bot migration to short link format *contains also*:

note: These channel do display the user names only for users with Latin++ type
user names. This is of no help at a large number of wikis. Please consider to
display the user names anyhow.

I mean display the user names UTF encoded.

Bug 14045 related.

The original request here was taken care of in r42695, with a minor adjustment in r42711 (see bug 4253). I don't know the status of the issue raised in comment #7.

Closing this bug since the requested feature has been added to MediaWiki.

Re comment #7: Please open a new bug for that.