Dear Mr. Aberaam,

I am the President of Wikimedia Portugal, the Portuguese chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I have a particular interest in technical matters related to the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia and the other projects hosted by the Foundation.

As you might know, we currently make citation links for articles available in the sidebar, so that people can cite a specific snapshot version of an article. However, due to the nature of the software, these links are often long and hard to read (for instance: <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=.ki&oldid=408287624>), which makes them not only inconvenient, but also prone to reproduction errors. Since the practice of citation is such a critical component of journalism and scientific publication, minimizing this risk would bring very significant benefits for scholars, journalists, and even users who want to share links in social media.

I believe it would be a great service to the readers if we could somehow reduce the complexity of these links. One volunteer editor recently registered enwp.org, which generates short URLs for English Wikipedia articles – for example: <http://enwp.org/.ki>. But as an international and multilingual movement, we host both projects in other languages (which invalidates the en- prefix of the domain) and projects of different nature, such as dictionaries, a free media collection, repositories of source documents, etc. (which invalidates the -wp part of the domain, which is short for "WikiPedia").

As such, I'd like to propose the use of the domain wi.ki, which is universally adaptable to our projects either through subdomains (en.wi.ki) or directories (wi.ki/pedia), or both.

What I ask from you is that, since we are a non-profit organization that depends on donations from our readers to keep our projects up, you would consider donating the wi.ki domain to Wikimedia Foundation, or provide it at a reduced cost. Such a donation would naturally be very much appreciated, and receive widespread divulgation in our official and unofficial communication channels, as well as in blogs and news outlets, which I believe would be beneficial for you.

Looking forward to hear from you,

Waldir Pimenta
Wikimedia Foundation