Couldn't find a better place to put this. I had an idea for there to be a namespace alias for the "Extension" namespace to be added. The namespace I was thinking of would be merely "E", but "EX" or something else could work in my opinion. I feel like this would be useful to make things quicker and shorter to link to, especially since I and some other people I know link to things like http://enwp.org/mw:Extension:MediaWikiChat in chats/IRC and whatnot. Does this sound like a good idea?
Topic on Project:Village Pump
MediaWiki suffers from an excessive level of complexity that alienates it to most target users. Are you sure that making links less understandable will make us a service? Your example, by the way, is three letters longer than a fully reliable https://www.mediawiki.org/?curid=170806
The fact that it would still display as "Extension:" on the page makes me think it wouldn't be any less understandable or difficult for new/inexperienced users. The "E:" prefix could just make things shorter to type in, to search, and to link to. Also, linking the curid seems like it would be more difficult for a new user if they were to see it as a link, since it doesn't have the page name in the URL.
Either you want the link to be short, or you want it to be self-explanatory. If you want it short, the curid will mostly do.
I guess, but I do think that the namespace alias would be both short and self-explanatory.