Bugs item #2685388, was opened at 2009-03-12 16:35 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by nobody You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=603138&aid=2685388...

Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread, including the initial issue submission, for this request, not just the latest update. Category: interwiki Group: None Status: Open Resolution: None Priority: 5 Private: No Submitted By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: interwiki bot shouldn't replace redirects

Initial Comment: According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:R#NOTBROKEN, links to non-broken redirects should not be fixed, thus e.g. this bot edit http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Extended_SMTP&curid=1064104&am... (changing de link from redirect page to subsection) is not correct, and this behaviour should be fixed.

Pywikipedia [http] trunk/pywikipedia (r6506, Mar 11 2009, 17:54:39) Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Apr 18 2007, 08:51:08) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)]

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Comment By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Date: 2009-04-01 09:59

Message: I think you cannot use -noredirect, because of this bug: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2555767&gro...

hope it'd be easy to fix, and the "-noredirect" option will be back.

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Comment By: LouPeter (loupeter) Date: 2009-03-18 07:31

Message: At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Interlanguage_links on the subsection "Bots and links to and from a section" is said:

... The activity of the bots also requires that interlanguage links are only put from an article to an article covering the same subject, not more and not less. It is technically possible to make an interlanguage link from an article to a section of an article, just like any link to a section. The bots can handle this. They will not try to link back from a section to the articles that links to it. Maintaining this links by hand, however, is complicated, so linking to a section is still not recommended. ...

So it seems not recommended but allowed. Maybe these kind of interwikis should remain out of the bot activities and be maintained by hand.

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Comment By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Date: 2009-03-17 22:12

Message: I think the two main points of WP:R#NOTBROKEN is that "fixing" these redirects really doesn't help, and usually hides useful information. In the case of en:Extended_SMTP, the German wiki has it redirecting to a section of SMTP. All other languages have it as a separate article, and I suspect the German wiki will eventually have that way also. But, even straight redirects are often useful to keep separate. It is common to have a single article which covers closely related topics "A" and "B" using a generic name [[C]], with redirects of [[B]]->[[C]] and [[A]]->[[C]]. Another language may have those subjects in separate articles, keeping the redirects lets both of them have inter-wiki links.

Rather than have a bot that "fixes" these redirects that aren't broken, it would be nice to have a bot that went thorough and identified pipes that are being used to avoid not-broken redirects. Say, there is a link of [[topic!altname]], with a redirect of [[altname]]->[[topic]], changing the link to just [[altname]] would help things.

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Comment By: Mikko Silvonen (silvonen) Date: 2009-03-17 16:28

Message: Is anybody listening...? Other users are telling me that my bot violates this convention on the English Wikipedia by replacing redirects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:R#NOTBROKEN

Or should I just start using the -noredirect option and ignore all the misspellings in interwiki links?

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Comment By: Mikko Silvonen (silvonen) Date: 2009-03-13 04:57

Message: I got this wish also on my bot talk page.

In general it may be impossible to distinguish "good" redirect pages from "bad" ones automatically (and my feeling is that most redirects encountered by bots are the result of initially misspelled page titles), but could we assume that redirects pointing to subsections are always good ones? I haven't thought about all the consequences.

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You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=603138&aid=2685388...