Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:36 UTC
This is an attempt to suggest a compromise between Bug 4891 (wontfix) which is looking for a way to allow tinyurl.com and Bug 1229 where diff columns are badly messed up by huge urls. Perhaps a better solution would be to find a better way to embed huge URLs in a page. I'm not talking about measly little 80 character URLS, but the huge ones that end up taking up three or four lines. Perhaps it would be useful for mediawiki to internally handle url redirection, maybe even as a separate namespace. This would have the advantage of moving huge urls by themselves without relying on external websites to redirect them. Two types of redirections might be useful: 1. Redirect a small keyword to a huge or commonly used URL. It would be neat if mediawiki could inline replace the URL target for these so people would know where they are going. 2. Redirect sites that need warnings of some sort. This could probably be done as a redirect to a regular page with a templated warning followed by a link to the target site. (this would require no changes except perhaps creation of another namespace and/or a policy change) I'm really asking for a new feature to address the first type of redirect. I've long wanted a way to assign an external link to a keyword, and there is currently no clean way to do it. Something like [[ext:somewhere else]] would be very nice.
Your keyword-to-URL can be addressed using the interwiki table. No special steps need to be added (well, maybe a special page to handle it...). You can see the list of shortwords used in wikimedia projects at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map However, it is not a good system for ''any long address''. Maybe creating a wikimedia-foundation url shorter that checks against the spam blacklist and can be removed by wikimedia sysops?
Just write the URL, it's not that hard.
