Reporting here the results of some quick investigation we did on MediaWiki’s handling of
redirects. Since this change [1] got merged, page redirects (such as en:Obama =>
en:Barack_Obama) refresh the URL client-side via Javascript. This doesn’t result in an
extra HTTP request so the change should have no impact on pageview analysis based on the
request logs. Thanks to Legoktm, Emufarmers and Halfak for tracking the source of this
change.
Dario
[1]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/143852/