page renaming on the Haskell Wiki
Hello, I just renamed several wiki pages. One reason for this renaming was the inconsistent capitalization of page titles. The thread starting with http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/2006-January/017485.html contains some background of this renaming. I think that a consistent and sensible naming of pages of the Haskell Wiki is very important. Since no further opinions were given concerning page naming and late page renamings might be inconvenient for wiki users, I decided to do this page renaming now, according to what was said in the above-mentioned thread and to what I thought was sensible. I have put some further information about the renaming on the wiki itself under http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/User:Wolfgang_Jeltsch/Page_renaming. Maybe the rationale for page titles given there can server as a basis for a kind of standard for Haskell Wiki page names? I'm open to comments. Best wishes, Wolfgang
In making such changes, please bear in mind "Cool URIs Don't Change": http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI This isn't to say "don't", but where possible, provide some redirection from the old name to the new name. To be effective, the web relies on stable links, so that references from elsewhere don't fade away. In the end, it is publishers own (presumed) goals in publishing to the Web that are compromised if URIs become inaccessible. #g -- Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
Hello,
I just renamed several wiki pages. One reason for this renaming was the inconsistent capitalization of page titles. The thread starting with http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/2006-January/017485.html contains some background of this renaming.
I think that a consistent and sensible naming of pages of the Haskell Wiki is very important. Since no further opinions were given concerning page naming and late page renamings might be inconvenient for wiki users, I decided to do this page renaming now, according to what was said in the above-mentioned thread and to what I thought was sensible.
I have put some further information about the renaming on the wiki itself under http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/User:Wolfgang_Jeltsch/Page_renaming. Maybe the rationale for page titles given there can server as a basis for a kind of standard for Haskell Wiki page names?
I'm open to comments.
Best wishes, Wolfgang _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
-- Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact
Am Dienstag, 21. Februar 2006 10:56 schrieb Graham Klyne:
In making such changes, please bear in mind "Cool URIs Don't Change":
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
This isn't to say "don't", but where possible, provide some redirection from the old name to the new name.
To be effective, the web relies on stable links, so that references from elsewhere don't fade away. In the end, it is publishers own (presumed) goals in publishing to the Web that are compromised if URIs become inaccessible.
#g
Hello again, well, there are certain points in the above-mentioned article which one should really think about. For example, I totally subscribe to the point of view that a URI shouldn't expose implementation details and should therefore not include a path component like "cgi-bin", for example. In a similar regard, we should probably think about removing the path component "haskellwiki" from our URIs since this path component "forces" our site to be a wiki. On the other hand, I think that the above W3C article is far too extreme. It tells you that stability is the most important thing concerning URIs. But I think that this is not true. In my opinion, another very, very important thing is that your URIs are reasonable and your URI-space is well structured. Otherwise you will confuse your users. How should a user know, for example, that one page uses sentence-style capitalization for its title and the other one doesn't. Or look at some URIs they use on the w3.org website: Annotea http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/ HTTP http://www.w3.org/Protocols/ Internationalization http://www.w3.org/International/ Patent Policy http://www.w3.org/2004/pp/ This inconsistency seems not very good to me. You cannot plan in advance what naming scheme will be appropriate in 50 years and maybe the one that will be appropriate then won't be appropriate now. I think that "good URIs somethimes have to change". Especially on a wiki where there is no webmaster allocating URIs so that you will often need to "fix things" later. Websites are changing, they are, in a sense, always dynamic. This holds especially for wikis. That said, I'm sure that changing of URIs is not something which should be taken too lightly. At least, one should always provide redirects from the old URI to the new. MediaWiki automatically inserts a respective redirect if you move a page. Alas, MediaWiki's redirects are not really (HTTP) redirects. Instead MediaWiki delivers a page under the redirect's URI which contains the content of the article the redirect points to, together with a note that a redirection took place. So the URI you see in your browser will be the "old" URI. Having said that redirects are important, let me state that, in my opinion, redirects shouldn't live forever. Normally, a redirect introduced by moving a page should be removed after a certain amount of time when nearly everybody had a chance to update his links. Managing a growing set of redirects is just not feasible. Keeping redirects forever also clutters the "All pages" page with lots of old page titles. Best wishes, Wolfgang
On 2/21/06, Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org> wrote:
In making such changes, please bear in mind "Cool URIs Don't Change":
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
This isn't to say "don't", but where possible, provide some redirection from the old name to the new name.
To be effective, the web relies on stable links, so that references from elsewhere don't fade away. In the end, it is publishers own (presumed) goals in publishing to the Web that are compromised if URIs become inaccessible.
Although, while the wiki is still so new, it's unlikely that there are already links to it so there shouldn't be any harm in moving pages created before there was a clear naming policy established. Furthermore, I think that pages that were initially created by mistake or with misspellings (e.g., "Perforamnce") are fair game for deletion. Davor
cubranic:
On 2/21/06, Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org> wrote:
In making such changes, please bear in mind "Cool URIs Don't Change":
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
This isn't to say "don't", but where possible, provide some redirection from the old name to the new name.
To be effective, the web relies on stable links, so that references from elsewhere don't fade away. In the end, it is publishers own (presumed) goals in publishing to the Web that are compromised if URIs become inaccessible.
Although, while the wiki is still so new, it's unlikely that there are already links to it so there shouldn't be any harm in moving pages created before there was a clear naming policy established. Furthermore, I think that pages that were initially created by mistake or with misspellings (e.g., "Perforamnce") are fair game for deletion.
Though the renamings (which I agree with) did break some internal links. I'd be hesitant to do large renamings again. -- Don
Am Mittwoch, 22. Februar 2006 06:24 schrieb Donald Bruce Stewart:
[...]
Though the renamings (which I agree with) did break some internal links.
What links did they break? Actually, I took care to update at least redirects which pointed to the old titles, since MediaWiki doesn't handle multiple redirects. For all other links, the automatic insertion of redirects for moved pages should prevent broken links. Of course, I may have missed something, so please tell me if something is broken (if you didn't already fix it yourself ;-) ).
I'd be hesitant to do large renamings again.
So we should probably establish a clear naming scheme and urge contributors to choose the titles of their newly created pages according to this scheme.
-- Don
Best wishes, Wolfgang
participants (4)
-
Davor Cubranic -
dons＠cse.unsw.edu.au -
Graham Klyne -
Wolfgang Jeltsch