[Mediawiki-l] Article IDs on Wikinews

Sat Feb 25 20:30:44 UTC 2006

Hi there,

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but here goes.

On Wikinews, we've started to talk about whether there could be any way 
to expose unique identifiers for news articles, rather than having to 
rely on page names. (See: 
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Water_cooler/technical#URLs_using_IDs_rather_than_titles) 

This is important because:

a) Without a unique identifier, it's impossible to tell when an article 
has moved. This is a particular problem for the RSS feed - without a 
unique ID, articles that get moved appear twice (or more).

b) It should be possible to have two articles with the same headline.

As I see it, there are two possible solutions. The first would be to 
just address a) by exposing an ID in the RSS feeds (in the <guid> 
sub-element of item), without altering the URLs.

The second way would be to alter the URLs so that they're at 
en.wikinews.org/wiki/8986456, allowing more than one article to have the 
same title.

I realise that both solutions would probably require a major re-working 
of the underlying MediaWiki architecture.

Is there any chance that such a change could ever be implemented? Or are 
there any other workarounds to the problem?

Cheers,

Frankie Roberto