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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

This is actually better than the title suggests.

I thought it might be something like automated edits to Wikipedia talk pages as a database or cache, which would be abusive.

But actually it's using Wikipedia entries as a smart name search. This is read-only and a clever and legit use of the WP. If the browsers allowed the use of spaces in the domain name portion URLs it would be even more useful, but it's probably better that they don't (out of spec for TLDs)

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Exactly. Almost gives credence to the idea of a well-behaved decentralized peer-to-peer network.

On the other hand, Wikipedia pages seemingly get "vandalized" all the time and sometimes aren't corrected immediately.

Doesn't this create a situation where a bad actor could change the Wikipedia page for a `semi-popular-brand.com` url listing to something bad? Anyone who used `semi-popular-brand.idk` in that timeframe would land in the bad page. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding.

This is possible with the DNS already which is why there have been various efforts to try to harden the protocol, to varying effect so far.

Sure but that requires knowledge of DNS, and a bad edit on wikipedia is much more accessible.

Are you saying it's not a good idea to rely on domain lookup from a public wiki?

I think you might be onto something...

Maybe an enhancement would be to have it look at the edit history and use the most recent URL that has remained on the page for at least X hours/days

One challenge with this approach can be seen by considering a scihub takedown followed immediately by a correction to a new TLD. The new(and suddenly correct) address would be changed to an incorrect old address.

pop up a warning instead to say there's been churn and let the user pick?

That would take way too long.

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