On 01/09/05, Sy sy1234@gmail.com wrote:
At the very least, that special page should have a series of links (or preferably checkboxes and a submit button) to fix each double/triple/whatever redirect.. making them all redirect to the final target.
This much I agree with; it could make the edit automatically, and leave an appropriate note in the edit history/watchlists/etc.
Frankly I would see value in an automatically self-healing setup where redirects adjust themselves after being followed to point down the chain to that final target page.
This I'm less sure of - sometimes, people will move a page so that they can create something else at the old location; in this case, at least some redirects to the old location *should not* be fixed. If they were automatically "healed" as soon as someone followed them, they would come to point to the wrong location. I think automating / assisting in the *process* is fine, but the decision to carry out the action should still be left to a human.
A > B > A when followed once A becomes just A with no redirecting.
Why is it not fixed at A->B, with B not redirecting (since you could equally describe the loop as B->A->B)? And what does "just A with no redirecting" mean - a blank page? How is this an improvement on the current situation, since it still needs someone to work out why it's gone wrong and fix it. And by arbitrarily manipulating the redirects like this, you've lost some of the information about the original situation - it is no longer as easy to see that A was a redirect to B in order to work out what it *should* be.
A > B > C > B when followed once, A becomes A > B
What is actually changed in this situtation? A already redirects to B, but you imply that it is A that changes; in fact, what needs changing is B and/or C, presumably to a blank page - but then you've lost any feedback that there is a broken connection. As I've said elsewhere [1] you'd end up needing to draw a diagram just to explain what chain of redirects the user had stumbled upon - it ought to be obvious that A->B->C->D->E->C is a bit of a mess, and *all* those should be changed; an 'auto-heal' algorithm might set A->E, B->E, C->E, D->E and E blank, but has that really '"fixed" anything?
One simple admin function to just "go fix all of that crap" would work though..
Agreed, that would be useful.
==Refs== [1] -> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2402#c3
See also the other current discussion of redirects on the other list, at http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-August/thread.html#31232 and http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-September/thread.html#31...