Our current permalinks are kinda ugly...
Particularly for non-ASCII bits the title portion of a link can be hugely ugly (all URL encoded) and hard to type in by hand, making a clean ID-based permalink easier to use from print.
eg from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=251850832
->
http://en.wikipedia.org/revision/251850832
or:
http://hi.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%82%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%B6%E0%A5%80_(1992_%E0%A4%AB%E0%A4%BC%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B2%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AE)&oldid=188492
->
http://hi.wikipedia.org/revision/188492
(A $wgActionPaths entry or similar can provide the exact path, as long as we've got some shorter way to do this standard.)
cf bug 16428 asking to put permalinks in the print version footer.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17981