[Developers] Changing "/topic/en" to "/en".. maybe

[Alec Flett]

Hey everyone -
So there has been some discussion internally about shortening the "/ 
topic/en" namespace down to just "/en". This is something that is  
being tossed around inside metaweb and I wanted to open up the  
discussion to the larger community to check the feasibility of this.  
To be clear, this is a one-time change while we're still in alpha. We  
really, really don't expect to do another system-wide change like  
this, especially once we're out of alpha.

The primary motivations are:
1) /topic seems superfluous, and in general adds heirarchy where there  
doesn't need to be.. it makes english names appear sooner in the id,  
which is nice for readability. We don't think there will ever be an  
actually domain "/en", "/fr" or whatever.

2) shortening urls - both at freebase and on anyone else using topic  
names in their URLs.  In particular, it makes anyone who inserts ids  
into their urls have a more readable url.

If we decide to do this, here is what would probably happen - feedback  
is encouraged!
1) MQL would start returning "/en/topic_name" instead of "/topic/en/ 
topic_name" in queries where you say "id": null, such as:
{"name": "Bob Dylan",
  "type": "/music/artist",
  "id": null}

(this would return "/en/bob_dylan")

2) MQL would continue to accept "/topic/en/bob_dylan" as a valid id  
for some period of time (a week? a month? 3 months? that's something  
we all need to decide)

3) During the time that the /topic/en compatibility exists, MQL would  
also return "/topic/en/topic_name" when the /topic id is explicitly  
specified in the query:

{"id": "/topic/en/bob_dylan", "name": null}

would return
{"id": "/topic/en/bob_dylan", "name": "Bob Dylan"}

4) Anyone can continue to link to http://www.freebase.com/view<id>  
using either /topic/en/topic_name or /en/topic_name, but freebase  
would do a HTTP 301 redirect to http://www.freebase.com/view/en/topic_name 
. We'll probably support the /view/topic URL mapping forever.

But of course the issue is: what will break? The big issue is  
obviously if people are storing freebase keys in their databases, and  
migration during a compatibility period is impossible.

Please reply on this thread with your concerns/issues or even if you  
just think this is an awesome idea :)

Alec