Last modified: 2013-10-31 21:58:03 UTC
The URL for Wikipedia.org can be written in different scripts. This is of particular value for languages that use different scripts. Being able to use a URL in the native scripts will make MediaWiki more usable not only but also for WMF projects. Thanks, GerardM
Are you suggesting eg being able to have http://βικιπαίδεια.org go to http://el.wikipedia.org or http://维基百科.org go to http://zh.wikipedia.org ? (In some cases a spelling/transliteration will be shared with several languages, so this wouldn't always be enough without a language or country code.) Do these work ok with Latin TLDs or would they need to be paired with a country-specific IDN ccTLD like .中国 for China or .台湾 for Taiwan? While these sorts of things could be set up as redirects, I don't think they're really suitable for the core hostnames to use in the URLs. We rely on using a shared 'wikipedia.org' domain to cut down *massively* on cookies needed for the shared login state, and mixing core URLs around could be painful, confusing, or error-prone.
As I understand it, it will be possible for the complete URL that needs to be typed to be in a different script. What I am looking for is that as a usability improvement redirects will be available that allow for the URL to be completely written in a non Latin script. Keeping the URL in that script after a redirect is not essential. Thanks, GerardM
The only non-latin TLDs available appear to be country-specific ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains#Internationalized_country_code_top-level_domains So perhaps these would be equivalents of http://wikipedia.nl, http://wikipedia.de, or http://wikipedia.fr which are country-specific portals linking to one or more language wikis?
(In reply to comment #3) > The only non-latin TLDs available appear to be country-specific ones: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top- > level_domains#Internationalized_country_code_top-level_domains > > So perhaps these would be equivalents of http://wikipedia.nl, > http://wikipedia.de, or http://wikipedia.fr which are country-specific > portals > linking to one or more language wikis? Perhaps not. If the domain used only corresponds to the name of the project in one specific language, there would be no need to link to all the language wikis of that geographic area.
