There's an English-language WIkipeida URL shortener in the form: http://enwp.org/Rossetta_Stone - It doesn't appear (from ) to be official, and l'm not aware of other-language equivalents. By preserving the last part of the URL - the article title, unless redirected - it retains human readability, at the expense of reduced brevity. The issue with language recognition is that there is not always a 1-1 relationship. Articles might exist in English, but not some other language, or vice versa; and there is sometimes disagreement over which article matches which. Suppose, hypothetically, the English-language Wikipedia has an article on each of the original iPhone and iPhone 4G, but the French-language article only has a single iPhone article, about both.which English article should English-speaking visitors to a French museum be re-directed to?