Rowan Collins wrote:
One could also
say that only wiki articles should live under the
en.wikipedia.org namespace and everything else should be somewhere else,
like
files.wikipedia.org or
skins.wikipedia.org etc.
Yes, that would certainly be a possibilty - but note that each
sub-domain has its own installation of the MediaWiki software, so
unless we had sub-sub-domains, like
skins.en.wikipedia.org (which
would make administering DNS that much harder), this would probably
require some pretty major changes to the code to use some "common"
repository - including some way of handling the exceptions where
things *need* to be different, etc.
This part's actually not really true. We have a single installation of
MediaWiki, and about a half-dozen copies of the base docroot which
consist of a few identical symlinks and a couple different ones.
Hypothetically we could move some of the skin files etc to a
subdomain... but we could never eliminate a few things things like
robots.txt or the script itself, and we need to maintain the previous
standard URLs as valid entry points. Exceptions aren't tenable for
all-inclusive projects like ours, particularly not for the canonical URLs.
My preference has been to merge the language domains to get URLs like this:
http://wikipedia.org/en/Foobar
http://wiktionary.org/la/imperium
and perhaps things like this:
http://wikipedia.org/edit/fr/Nice
http://wikipedia.org/history/fr/Nice?from=200411112117
http://wikipedia.org/revision/fr/1063501
But we haven't got round to that yet. I've added some preliminary
support for 'action URLs' to the 1.5 code to allow prettifying the
non-view actions (edit, history, etc).
But we cannot and will not have canonical or standard URLs like this, ever:
http://en.wiktionary.org/robots.txt <- is this a dictionary entry or the
robots exclusion file??
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)