- 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.
- Another theory is that the mod_rewrite directives required to make this work are not the simplest of things to master and thus the Lowest Troll, Juxo has not gotten around to configuring the directives, though given support on the issue he might configure this site to comply with the Standard wiki URI
- It's because the directives are hard to master that the software should be shipped with the defaults right in the first place, in the config scripts etc.
- 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.
From Talk:Cookbook, a slightly different proposal:
- It would be good also to fix the URLs to something easy to remember. Therre is discussion of shifting to URLs like this
- domain/en/edit/Slow_Food
- So that you "en:edit" (a form) the en:Slow_Food entry by going there, without the usual clicking and such. Then /en/wiki/Slow_Food can show yu the activity wikitivity on the page, and /en/Slow_Food itself just has the latest and possibly editorially-approved page (meaning no vandalism ever shows up to the public) which could just appear 24 hours after any edit to the entry, or be moved up faster once someone looked at it for typos and such (as they always do). Making our URLs like theirs would be a good first step to cooperation, so if they're changing theirs, we should dive in and work out the right scheme:
- domain/LANGUAGE/VERB/ARTICLE
- That makes more sense than VERB/LANGUAGE/ARTICLE since the verb is in some language.
- Actually the current syntax is service:language:article, but indeed service/language/(verb)/article would be more sensical, where the "verb" would be either "edit", "view", "print" or "collate"