shortest Mikipedia / MediaWiki link syntax talk at http://www.mediawiki.org/?curid=84277

Hi! I want to inform you about a MediaWiki threat at http://www.mediawiki.org/?curid=84277
"Is http://de.wikipedia.org/?curid=2809853 an expoloit or can this be considered as a legitimate stable redirect ?".

main statement: "A few days ago I noticed that links as http://de.wikipedia.org/?curid=2809853 can also be used nowadays."
...
"The url links to an article about Ernst Lossa from the Wikipedia in German. Ernst was a child killed in the euthanasia program. Librarians are using VIAF:38128467 as authority control number to refer to his person.

You might be interested also in the following topics:
http://www.mediawiki.org/?curid=84279
"Is there any updated documntation about the actual implementation of **utf-8 / Unicode normalization** in MediaWiki?"
http://www.mediawiki.org/?curid=84280
"Is there any updated documntation about the actual implementation of **utf-8 / Unicode truncation** in MediaWiki?"

keywords:
☛ "UTF8Normalization" ?searchtype=talk&search=UTF8Normalization
☛ "UTF8Truncations" ?searchtype=talk&search=UTF8Truncations
☛ "ShortestURL" ?searchtype=talk&search=ShortestURL

Since I was personally invited to post my thoughts in this thread, I'd like to recommend the following work:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/t087463lnl467461/
Ethical reflections on the problem of spam by R.A. Spinello. I think it applies equally well in this forum, such as when you have something to say in a group and you want the group members to sit up and pay attention. :-)

>2 Hi! I found via /search.php?search=Spinello&searchtype=authorname two "orphaned = lowercase only" ("empty") author names. Inserted a canonical name, recalculated these empty author names and combined them with the main author url. Now also some authorty control links can be found at /author/spinelloricharda.
see /commonknowledge/changelog.php?type=2&item=4869737
and /commonknowledge/changelog.php?type=2&item=4869738.
This CK can norbaly be found knowing where to retieve the id's from the "/issues" author subpage.

Note: "empty" author urls partly generated by CK canonical, official and / other name as well as by other authors (imported by sources or added manually) are causing today a lot of inconveniences. Please feel free to discuss improuvments at another place.

>3 I'm still not sure what you are trying to do; I mentioned the author of the work (R.A. Spinello) mostly in passing and used square brackets to invoke Touchstones, but LT didn't recognize that particular abbreviation so I thought it would be ignored.

You seem to have identified the correct author Spinelli and added your VIAF link to his LT page (I'm assuming you did it because I mentioned him, as this doesn't seem to be an attribute of most author pages yet).

Now, what does all this have to do with Wikipedia? First I thought you were trying to alert us to some urgent security issue, but now I realize that "threat" is probably just a typo for "thread"... :-)

Could you at least provide some context; why do you think LT Wikipedians in particular should follow this thread on Mediawiki, and is that thread even likely to resolve your issue, considering the response you got over there: "This is really not the right place to ask this sort of question." Do you think that response was wrong?

I understand that you are trying to address some technical issue, but since we didn't already have an ongoing discussion about it, throwing in links to discussions in other fora isn't going to help. If you want to start a discussion here, give us the broad picture (what this means for Wikipedia) rather than links and technical implementation details from your current desktop, because we can't see your desktop.

And my initial objection remains: Starting a thread in a discussion group on LT in no way warrants notifying the members of said group about it via comments on their personal pages. We don't want group discussions to spill over on our personal pages; that's part of why groups were created in the first place. Imagine everyone starting a thread doing the same; LT would become useless in an instant. Posting such notifications in bulk is spamming, and that's why I considered it relevant to mention a book about the ethics of spamming. I'm sorry if my comment was a bit dense.

I am a member of this group since January 2008 (/topic/28574)
. I saw the "Inactive group?" topic. It seems to me that there are only few activities here. In my tag cloud you may find also tags as:
☛WP.da ☛WP.de ☛WP.de¹³ ☛WP.eo ☛WP.es ☛WP.fi ☛WP.fr ☛WP.he ☛WP.hu ☛WP.it ☛WP.ja ☛WP.pl ☛WP.pt ☛WP.ro ☛WP.ru ☛WP.sv
The works taged with such tags direct to authors where Wikipedia links from other then the English Wikipedia are used mainly because the English Wikipedia did not have articles at the time they have been inserted. The label is for example "de.Wikipedia . ger" indicating both the language prefix used in Wikipedia and the LT language code.
These links are preserved even if the Wikipedia pages are moved. There is neither a risk to misspell names, nor to post incorretly url-encoded links (rejected by many browsers.

Example: I see
Tag: ☛WP.ru
Любовь и шахматы Элегия М. Таля : История одной л​юбви, литературно излож. А. Аркановым ​de Sally Landau

/author/404260641
linking to http://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2125315
please note that http://ru.wikipedia.org/?curid=2125315 (without "w/index.php") works fine also.

Touchstones test Таль, Салли perfect

(draft)
Example: I see
Tag: ☛WP.sv
A Faraway Island de Annika Thor
http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77358 Annika Thor (without an English article)
http://sv.wikipedia.org/?curid=77358 is the shortened link

Example: I see
Tag: ☛WP.ja
Ale agodes fun Talmud : a zamlung fun ale mayses, legenden, fabelen ... fun gants Talmud Bavli un Yerushalmi : in dray Teyl. 2, Bavli de Tashrak
http://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=225841 イズレイル・ゼヴィン (without any translation linked to it)
http://ja.wikipedia.org/?curid=225841 is the shortened link

looking at my contributions at Japanease Wikipedia and Russian Wikipedia one might be confused.
With the VIAF Javascript from commons:Commons:VIAF inter project linking/viaf.user.js Greasemonkey-Skript
one will have some Latin hints. Nowaday only for those VIAF numbers and only for those German authority control numbers (PND) inserted already to the German Wikipedia until today.
This can be seen at the pictures from
commons:Commons:VIAF inter project linking#Todays status.

Please take you some time to understand if the method of VIAF inter project linking can be an advantage in your work.

Note: For maintenance it would be necessary to be able to search for the posted author urls. I imagine that both should work:
a) text strings which are included
b) regular expressions (REGEX)
I have seen many links using "%20" as Replacement for "_". Some field values are using spaces. Noot sure if there are some browsers wich will truncate such urls.

>5,6,7 Ok, it looks like you are trying to address several issues at once. While one solution may eventually deal with all of them, until then I recommend discussing them separately, perhaps in different threads, in order not to unnecessarily limit the range of potential solutions. The issues I see are:

1. URL longevity. I agree this is a problem with MediaWiki (and even lots of other content management systems) in general, as user-readable URLs tend to be arbitrarily composed and sometimes deserve being changed (misspellings, factual corrections, whatever). An integer number would essentially never have to be changed (unless a confusion between two similar pages arises, such as two authors with identical names).

2. Multiple-language inter-website links. This is another matter, as even with unique page subject numbers that are independent of language, a link to a page in Russian won't necessarily be useful on a website written primarily in French.

You may identify and enumerate additional issues, but that only reinforces my point that we should address each one in turn, independently of the others.

As this thread is addressed to LT Wikipedians, it seems appropriate to consider what each issue means to us. We will hardly influence how Wikipedia operates all by ourselves, so right now I make the observation that what you propose is not how Wikipedia is used today, even if those numeric URLs happen to work. Wikipedia itself has a system of dealing with issue #2 (cross-language references between articles) and another, albeit an inconvenient one, to deal with #1 (post-move redirect links). Addressing these issues from the LT side (or from the outside in general) would be a major undertaking, one that won't end with the implementation of some piece of software.

I don't want to go into technical detail until we have agreed on the scope of each issue, because that would require time being spent without regard for the hope of a successful outcome. Will it be worth it? Devising a plan for how to create author links on LT is one thing, redesigning Wikipedia is another. Which goal are you trying to achieve?

>8 Thanks for the answers. Will prepare a post about the shortesturls at a larger group.