At time of writing, w.wiki/b redirects to the Hungarian Wikipedia article for Budapest, w.wiki/m redirects to the English Wikipedia article for Mexico City, and w.wiki/q redirects to the English Wikipedia article "Queer" (in the LGBT+ sense). This [[ https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#URL shortener for the Wikimedia projects will be available on April 11th | strikes me as odd ]], because I would have thought it would be much more appropriate for those to redirect to Wikibooks, Meta-Wiki and Wikiquote respectively to match the interwiki table. (Wikispecies and the Media-Wiki wiki also seem to have been left out.)
Since the extension is still yet to be activated for everyone, I think it would be appropriate to prune the single-character URLs on or before 11 April so that it remains possible for the WMF to use most of them for new projects and initiatives in future without breaking a lot of incoming links, especially since it's (vaguely) possible that the short URLs could become significant in WMF branding/advertising.
w.wiki/a redirecting to Alan Turing's enwiki article is nice, but if the URL shortener is supposed to last a long time (i.e. on the scale of multiple decades), then it might be appropriate to change it to something else in case it would be preferable to use w.wiki/a for something else (most likely a new project with a name containing the letter "a"). There would be no harm in reserving a two-letter combination for Turing's article.
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== Possible issues with the "Easter egg" links ==
* The links may be perceived to have symbolic value regardless of the original intention, and they may appear to be reflective of strong systemic biases (e.g. under-representation of women, over-representation of Europeans)
* The one-character Easter eggs have already been archived to the Wayback Machine, so there is not as much value in keeping them active just for the sake of it (the information will not be lost if the links are changed)
* The relevance of most the Easter eggs will diminish as time passes
* Some of the links are clearly presented as having a purpose (easyconvenient access to important WMF projects/initiatives), whereas others are random
* People may unsuccessfully try to use these links to get to Wikibooks and the five other projects which don't have one-character links (Wikiquote, Wikispecies, Incubator, Meta, MediaWiki)
* It may be in WMF and community interest to use one-character strings for Wikibooks, etc., as well as for future projects/initiatives (possible branding/outreach benefits)
* It will be more disruptive to change the links after the extension is enabled, because incoming links will be broken
* News sites and blogs, particularly those which are tech- or Internet-focused, often cover Easter eggs of other popular websites (e.g. Google), so if someone finds the Easter eggs then there may be coverage which closely examines these links
* Wikipedia readers who use `w.wiki/w` would easily discover the Easter eggs, so they could quickly become highly visible outside the Wikimedia community
== Possible methods of removing or replacing Easter eggs ==
* Software removal – stewards can delete links, but cannot change them
* Database entry removal – changing links in the database results in severe caching issues
* Database wipe – [unconfirmed]
* Reinstallation of Extension:UrlShortener – [unconfirmed]
== Possible outcomes ==
* Easter eggs are kept; ticket is closed with no further resolution
* Easter eggs are removed by stewards and/or WMF staff, but cannot be reused in future without technical changes
* Easter eggs are manually changed in the database, causing caching issues
* (other)