On Sat, 2005-07-23 at 22:49 +0200, Brion Vibber wrote:
More generally, it's completely irresponsible
for a web-based resource
to rearrange content pages without providing a redirect from the old
URL. This is a basic principle which applies just as much to Wiktionary
as to Wikipedia, just as much to Hewlett Packard's driver web pages as
to Slashdot postings, just as much to a database of autogenerated
earthquake reports or a collection of press releases as to an online
academic journal.
100% agreed on this point, and one that many people don't seem to
understand. So it bears repeating:
More generally, it's completely irresponsible
for a web-based resource
to rearrange content pages [well, just re-read the paragraph above :) ]
Actually, it bears restating. Here's an old Tim Berners-Lee rant on the
subject, called "Cool URIs Don't Change", that I often trot out whenever
the topic rears its ugly head, which it does way too frequently:
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
In my mind, making an exception for Wiktionary projects would be an
extremely disappointing reversal of very good policy maintained by the
rest of the Wikimedia projects.
Rob
Hoi,
Well Tim Berners-Lee has one good line on the Wiktionary situation: "Do
you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If so, you
chose them very badly." I was not there at the time but what I
understood from some that the Wiktionary people where told that they
could not have uncapitalised articles. This demand for uncapitalised
articles did not go away and over time the cost of this change improved.
It is certainly true for the Dutch wiktionary that there was a long time
between the first request and the moment it was granted. I do not know
if there ever was a technical reason why we could not have it, the only
argument that I remember was that we needed something to do with case
insensitive search, something we are still waiting for. All this
procastinantion meant that several thousand words had to be changed, by
hand in the Dutch case with a script in the English case.
It is "nice" to have persistence in your links. It is cool if it is just
a technical choise because then it is a no brainer. In the Wiktionary
case people do use redirects for correctly spelled words and as they are
not interested in creating articles for the inflections they use
redirects or they use redirects for the wrong spellings or they use
redirects for different orthografies. So yes, it is disappointing but it
is not a reversal of policy but the correction of a bad situation.
Thanks,
GerardM