On ĵaŭ, 2003-01-23 at 07:55, Florian Schnadt wrote:
Redirecting gives at least two problems:
1) small language wikis
Redirecting to wikis without enough project ("meta") information or very few
articles might be a bad idea. There could be a link to an appropriate page on en
or meta and some explanation in a prominent place (at the top :) ) until this
changes.
True.
2) outside links
Redirecting will break links if my browser doesn't use english language setting. A
somewhat dirty fix might be to check if this is an outside link and only redirect
if the page exists in the language wikipedia. Thus my german language setting will
take me to the english chemistry article if I click a link outside of
wikipedia.org (
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry) but take me to the german
page on most (at least some ;) ) names, cities etc.
As has been promised a number of times before, current canonical-form
links to articles* will *never* be broken, to the best of our ability.
(The main exceptions being if the project somehow loses control of the
domain name, or if the present URI system is no longer used a few
decades from now and no software supports it anymore. Or for
_particular_ pages, if it is deleted completely or had a technically
misformed title that must be removed instead of just redirected to avoid
breaking things.)
* For English wikipedia, this means:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_title
and the older:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Some_title
will always continue to work, even if we change the canonical format
they will redirect to the current location. (If a page is renamed on the
wiki, we have redirects within the wiki system to get you there, even if
you have an outdated link, bookmark, search engine query, or printed
citation.) Other languages' old-form canonical links should be preserved
as well; where they are not, this is an error and should be reported so
we can correct it.
Proposed browser-sniffing redirection for languages would *only* be for
direct access to
http://www.wikipedia.org/ or
http://wikipedia.org/ with
no page name specfied, *never* within the wiki.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)