Author: dig.mediazilla
Description:
(It could be that something like this was already proposed, I just haven't fount
it).
It is nice to see what the URL is pointing to in English (or any ASCII-7 based
alphabet). Unfortunately, it is not the case for most other languages. For
most of them, especially for the languages which are not based on Latin
alphabet, URL-escaping makes URL unreadable and very very long. So, it would be
nice to have some kind of short URLs for wikipedia pages. This will make it
easier for the user to copy and paste the short URL into e-mail or on the web
page. (I saw the reference to the wikipedia article in Russian in e-mail -- it
is horrible: 3 lines of 80 chars each, absolutely unreadable).
The short URL itself could be something like this:
http://www.wiki???????.org/u/xyzuv
where
????? is a project name ({m,p}edia, etc) u is a special prefix (may be empty); xyzuv is an "encoded" form of longer URL (very much like tinyurl.com's one).
It also would be nice to have this short URL on the printed page (as text, as
well as a link).
As a side-effect, the bots on #XXrc-channel will be less verbose. We, at
#ru.wikipedia, are using such short URLs, they seem more practical, and overall
impression is better, than while using wprc-bots directly.
Shorter URLs, happier users.
Best regards,
DIG (Dmitri I GOULIAEV)
1024D/63A6C649: 26A0 E4D5 AB3F C2D4 0112 66CD 4343 C0AF 63A6 C649
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement