Standard wiki URI

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

A standard wiki URI has the following form:

protocol://language.domain.top_level_domain/wiki/editable_version_of_page

The vast majority of links to the GFDL text corpus are of this form, which originated at Wikipedia. Unfortunately not all mediawiki or GetWiki GetWiki-based services comply with this reasonable standard, and many (including Metaweb) make cgi and directory information visible in the URI they report as "the address" when pages are retrieved. This changes with each release of software, and is not information the user should try to remember. As with lack of an interwiki link standard, lack of such a uniform external standard for XML and HTML pages inhibits referencing and can only slow growth of the Metaweb.

With such a standard that expresses language and editability in the URI directly, one need only swap domain names to find the parallel article, and URIs are easily remembered for citing on the radio, on the phone, in person, without having to look up "which large public wiki uses which nonstandard."

See en:Wikinfo:standard_wiki_URI for further discussion of this and implementation potential for GetWiki 2.0. It is not on the MediaWiki radar at all.