Hi! Searching for the shortest urls for wikis using scripts other then Latin was a longtime nightmare.
urls using the "wgArticleId" from "mw.config.set" as http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2809853 have been an intermediate solution to avoid long properly url encoded links.
A few days ago I noticed that links as http://de.wikipedia.org/?curid=2809853 can also be used nowadays. The url does not use "w/index.php" any more.
Question: Can MadiaWiki assure that these shorter urls are legitimete, stable, well documented and used as testcases before any further release is submited to svn?
Thank you very much for your future answers. gangleri לערי ריינהארט (talk) 19:10, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
Topic on Project:Support desk
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.
It took me some time to get what you mean, but I think I got it. :-) The value of "curid" does not have to do with a way to identify Ernst Lossa as a person.
The value only is an internal identifier in MediaWiki. All it does is to instruct MediaWiki to get the page data for the article, which was saved in the database with the unique id 2809853. The page which was saved directly after this version has the id 2809854. Some documentation is available in Manual:Parameters_to_index.php.
mw.config.set({,,,, wgPageName":"Ernst_Lossa","wgTitle":"Ernst Lossa", "wgCurRevisionId":99548829,"wgArticleId":2809853, ...} ...)
nr. 0 http://de.wikipedia.org/?curid=2809853
nr. 1 http://de.wikipedia.org/?oldid=99548829 today the "last"
nr. 2 http://de.wikipedia.org/?oldid=99548703 today the "previous"
The reason about short urls was addressed between others at bugzilla:0023427 - "Introduce magic word {{PAGEID}} to provide the page_id of the current page ". More features request on short url topic where raised by WikiMedia comunities in languages based on other scripts then Latin. I remember many raised by Wikipedia in Russian.
While url 0 renders (nearly) as de:Ernst Lossa (I say "nearly" because I have not compared the page source codes with advanced tools), url 1 seems to contain url 0 together with some links to diff functionality. url 1 is not stable I mean it is not linking to the most actual page as url 0 does. It will have the same "kismet'" as url 2.
To fully understand the question: Is url 0 "always" linking to the most actual version of this article? The question is not if the actual page title will always be redirected to a renamed page as "Ernst Lossa (foobar)" That is a maintenance issue of the wiki community. The question is not related to the question what happens if the article / page is deleted and if some revisions are restored again. (In some discussions I was listening to some opinions that a new "wgArticleId" would / might be assigned by the database. לערי ריינהארט (talk) 00:53, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
This is really not the right place to ask this sort of question. You should probably ask an ops person (I'd imagine), and I don't believe they generally look through this form.
>Question: Can MadiaWiki assure that these shorter urls are legitimete, stable, well documented and used as testcases before any further >release is submited to svn? Thank you very much for your future answers. gangleri לערי ריינהארט (talk) 19:10, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
This (the lack of needing /w/index.php) is related to how Wikimedia (not mediawiki) is configured (As in how the apaches are configured). This sort of behaviour would not necessarily happen on non-wikimedia mediawiki installs.
addendum: The above I was talking about if doing curid without /w/index.php is stable. For your second question (difference between curid and oldid) curid is the page's number. oldid is the revision number. oldid changes on every revision. curid only changes on edge cases (like being deleted and restored). Note that the proposed short url extension will use a different number that is neither curid or the oldid.
Thanks for the answers Bawolff! I am aware of "oldid". It was mentioned only because "oldid" adds some "headers" also.
Questions:
a) Are there special keywords at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla for topics related to the stability of the setup of WikiMedia Foundation servers?
Could all required testcases be added to MediaWiki in order to assure that such urls would not be broken / invalid in the future?
b) Could all relevant parts of the apache configuration required to achieve similar results at other MediaWiki installation be documented?
Could you please address these two topics in the relevant forum?
Thanks for any support in advance! לערי ריינהארט (talk) 02:38, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
a) Are there special keywords at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla for topics related to the stability of the setup of WikiMedia Foundation servers?
Any bug about Wikimedia server set up would be in the Wikimedia product of bugzilla. (vs normal bugs in MediaWiki product). Some Wikimedia server config related bugs end up in RT, which is secret (Don't ask me why its secret, I've never really understood. Something about billing info goes in there too)
b) Could all relevant parts of the apache configuration required to achieve similar results at other MediaWiki installation be documented?
The actual config files are at http://noc.wikimedia.org . Any set up where url parameters on the root url gets forwarded to index.php should work in the fashion you are looking for.
Could all required testcases be added to MediaWiki in order to assure that such urls would not be broken / invalid in the future?
No, you cannot add test cases to MediaWiki for testing software that is not MediaWiki. One could add a test case to verify that urls of the form http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1234 don't break, but that's as close as you can get.
It was mentioned only because "oldid" adds some "headers" also
curid will add noindex tags that stop google from indexing non-canonical versions of the url. (Not quite a header, but probably what you're thinking of).