Standard wiki URI

In HTML and XML referring to articles in the GFDL text corpus, a standard wiki URI is stated as follows:

protocol://language.service_domain.top_level_domain/wiki/page_name/subpage#section

Only the "/wiki/" is constant. Although they are a little more complex than the interwiki link standard that applies when both protocol (http://) and subprotocol (/wiki/) can be assumed, these are relatively easy to remember, e.g. one can easily rattle off URIs of the form http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/troll where only troll must change to find some other article within en.wikipedia, and where one would be able to simply swap consumerium for wikipedia to find the equivalent article there, i.e. http://en.consumerium.org/wiki/troll. If no article in that language at that service exists, then an explanatory message in the requested language should appear to offer perhaps a machine-translated page, or approved references elsewhere.

Supporting this standard radically simplifies wiki linking for the average user and lets different web services compete to support the GFDL text corpus better. Unfortunately neither MediaWiki nor GetWiki imposes them as a default. They really should.

One theory is that they do not do so because Wikimedia wishes its own URIs to be stable, but those of other users of MediaWiki software to be ever-changing, and thus difficult to remember. This makes it more likely that URIs of Wikipedia pages will be coded into many HTML and XML pages, which helps them advance their claim that they are sole reliable stewards of the GFDL text corpus.

GetWiki developers in general resist that claim and are far more likely to implement the standard as a default, and indeed to work towards wikitext standards in general.

See Wikinfo: standard_wiki_URI for more, and interwiki link standard for the equivalent issue for links within the GFDL text corpus.