I’ve had another idea!
I saw Matthew Somerville (@dracos) tweet:
Reading about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothianidin and bees
and it occurred to me, both that a fantastically high number of Wikipedia links are tweeted, and that Wikipedia URLs are relatively long. This latter fact might have been significant, if Matthew had needed to say a few more words, or was talking about something with a longer name. He could have shortened his link, using, say, Bit.ly, but then he’d have had to repeat the stem:
Reading about Clothianidin http://bit.ly/dE6pUf and bees
which is hardly shorter, and disrupts the flow.
What if we agreed a special tag, say W# or w:, used like this:
Reading about w:Clothianidin and bees
and Twitter clients automatically swapped that for a Wikipedia link:
Reading about Clothianidin and bees
Update
Twitter clients could allow users to set their preferred language-version of Wikipedia, and perhaps find the relevant translations of articles (which Wikipedia could better facilitate, using rel=alternate headers), authors could also specify a language, such as w:fr:brie or w:de:München
How would the client know to link to ‘Clothianidin and bees’ as opposed to ‘Clothianidin and’, ‘Clothianidin’, or ‘Clothianidin and bees mating rituals’ ?
Simon: w:Clothianidin vs. w:Clothianidin_and_bees – though perhaps w:Clothianidin-and-bees could also be parsed.
I’m grateful to Matthew for – some time ago – drawing my attention to this unofficial Wikipedia URL shortener: http://enwp.org/Clothianidin
It doesn’t solve the above issue, but is of interest, nonetheless.
Updated.