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a specific search string leads to a page outside wikipedia
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Description

Author: cwscott.br

Description:
On page:

http://www.wikipedia.org/

enter the following search string:

wiki:x

and you will be taken to a page outside wikipedia:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?x

belonging to the company:

Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.

"a small consultancy that has specialized in object-oriented programming"

This appears to happen regardless of the language chosen (I tried for English, Portuguese, French, German).

Very strange!


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
URL: http://www.wikipedia.org/

Details

Reference
bz26837
ReferenceSource BranchDest BranchAuthorTitle
repos/releng/train-dev!3review/dancy/add-geoip-database-debmaindancyDockerfile.deploy: Add geoip-database package
repos/releng/cli!17gitlab-ci-no-specified-mirrormainaddshore.gitlab-ci.yml: Don't specify docker mirror here
Customize query in GitLab

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 11:17 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz26837.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

wiki: is a interwiki link. For the complete list of active interwiki links on MWF projects, you can look at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map

cwscott.br wrote:

The page:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map

states:

"Remember to specify why the prefix would be useful on a significant number of pages on Wikimedia Foundation projects."

Why is this prefix considered 'useful'?

It is not clear why such a 'significant' prefix is allocated to a company whose site does nothing when the prefix is used.

Surely it would be reasonable, as a condition for the granting of a prefix, to require that the site to which the prefix points ALWAYS provides a meaningful message when it is (probably inadvertently) used, and when there is no other meaningful content to return.

The message could be something like:

"You have activated a Wikimedia prefix for a site which has nothing useful to return for your search request. For further information see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map"

(In reply to comment #3)

Why is this prefix considered 'useful'?

It is not clear why such a 'significant' prefix is allocated to a company whose
site does nothing when the prefix is used.

It's a really really old prefix. That wiki it links to is Ward Cunningham's wiki.

If we created it now, we probably wouldn't use that prefix, you're right.

But changing the prefix now would probably break a lot of links.