Short URLs in OSM

General talk
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2

There are a few tricks that allow you to shave off characters from OSM urls.

First, xyz.osm.org generally forwards to xyz.openstreetmap.org. This works for pretty much every first-party OSM resource.

Second, some OSM services have additional means to shorten URLs. For example:

  • The map has shortlinks.
  • 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.)

So your example of
https://tinyurl.com/psavpbv4
could be
https://wiki.osm.org/JOSM/Guide

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.

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