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:
* Links may be perceived to have symbolic value, and they may appear to be reflective of strong systemic biases (e.g. under-representation of women, over-representation of Europeans)
* Some of the links are clearly presented as having a purpose (easy access to important WMF projects/initiatives), whereas others are random
* Wikipedia readers who use `w.wiki/w` would easily discover the other Easter eggs, so they could become highly visible outside the Wikimedia community
* People may unsuccessfully try to use these links to get to Wikibooks and the five other projects which don't have one-character links
* 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)
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)