Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:16 UTC
Old links like "http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Alan+Turing" , which escape spaces with + do not work. They are redirected to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan+Turing, which brings up a 404. They should go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing .
The fact that links like one above used to work was a bug. According to the specs, + should be converted to space in query strings, but not in paths. This non-compliant behaviour has now been fixed. Since we have now configured apache to stop irreversibly mangling plus signs, we can now use them in titles. This was a much-requested feature. Any links to old URLs should be changed, or in extreme cases, redirect pages can be created.
I can't change them. I just saw some on Xtrj.org, the partial encyclopedia mirror than no one can edit. I'm not asking that regular en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ links accept plusses. However, it was accepted practice for wikipedia.com links. Wikipedia itself formatted the links like that; see http://web.archive.org/web/20020622034455/http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Turing+machine . I'm just asking for backwards compatibility.
Different software, no longer messes up links.
