When providing URLs for the documentation, for example, in posters or with QR codes, the URLs are very long and difficult to type, or they generate QR codes with many dots (for high-resolution cameras). It will be interesting to have a URL shortening mechanism based on the osm.org domain; however, I don’t know where to post this idea.
Another thing could be to have a wiki mechanism that automatically provides a short URL for the articles.
This idea came from this poster with 3 tinyurls that point to the wiki.
This community forum allows you to omit topic titles and such from the URL. So this thread could be linked as community.osm.org/t/8748.
Some Wiki pages with long titles have user-created redirects. And you can omit the /wiki part of the URL for all wiki pages. (I wish MediaWiki allowed making those shorter URLs the default.)
Just 3 extra characters (32 instead of 29) and it gives the user an idea what the link is about without having to open all 3 of them first.
And of course, if you want to shave off characters from a printed URL, omitting the https:// would be an obvious next step.
A good start would be to make links like my example above more easy to discover. This could be a good addition to the wiki sidebar alongside the existing “Permalink” feature.
As mentioned above, there are plenty of shortcuts that can cut down URL lengths. If there’s still interest in creating truly short URLs for the wiki, the URLShortener MediaWiki extention can provide this functionality, generating links such as https://w.wiki/4e. This sacrifices readability of the page name to create an even shorter URL.
You’re right - the extension would have to be installed on the OSM wiki for it to be able to shorten OSM wiki links. I should have made this clearer in my post.
In the absence of the UrlShortener extension, you can already get a relatively short URL using numeric page IDs or revision IDs (which make for better permanent links anyways).
Sometimes you need to link to a snapshot of the page at a particular time. For example, in tagging discussions, it can often be helpful to prove that the wiki said something and ensure that your statement holds true when someone reads it in the future. To link to a specific revision of a page:
(Optional) If you need to link to an older revision, click on the History tab and click on the specific revision you’re interested in.
Click “Permanent link” in the sidebar.
Copy the oldid URL parameter, that is, the number at the end of the URL.
Prepend wiki.osm.org/?oldid=.
For example, the archived version of this successful proposal can be found at wiki.osm.org/?oldid=2139256. This link will persist as long as the page or revision hasn’t been deleted, even if the page history gets merged with another page’s history.
, so you can link to 