Hi Jane,
I don't think there is any Wikimedia project that
actively deletes redirects.
You don't have to believe me. Just check the delete logs. There are tens of thousands
of deleted redirects. Because they were cluttering "Allpages" lists. Because
they were common spelling mistakes and "we do not support mistaken spellings".
Because
people also use redirects as a way of "bundling
concepts"
in a wrong way (Looking for a scientific term and landing on the vita of the scientist
whom it is attributed to, for instance, is annoying) ... and so on.
So this redicet idea is not suited for all Wikipedias.
Purodha
"Jane Darnell" <jane023(a)gmail.com> writes:
Purodha,
Redirects are cheap - so cheap in fact, that they take up more space when you delete them,
so even if they are misspelled or whatever, they are mostly left to rot unless they break
something (for example when someone wants to use a redlink like [[redlink]] and someone
else makes a redirect for "redlink"). I don't think there is any Wikimedia
project that actively deletes redirects.
In general, redirects are supposed to be used as alternate names for the same thing, and
in Wikidata, this is done by typing in alternate labels. Of course people also use
redirects as a way of "bundling concepts" - just take a look at all the
redirects to the article for "insurance" for all the types of insurance that
don't yet have their own article.
Before Wikidata there were lots of interwiki links to redirects, and this caused multiple
issues with unresolvable interwikilinks. Wikidata was invented to be able to use
persistent identifiers for Wikipedia articles. Now everyone is surprised that now the
interwikilinks work differently from before. The fact that redirects are not supported is
by design and not a bug. Going forward, instead of making redirects, Wikidatans should
just keep creating items in Wikidata and let the Wikipedias take care of themselves by
letting them create articles and redirects in the normal wiki way. It should not be a goal
for Wikidata to sitelink to every redirect in every Wikipedia, just as it is not a goal to
sitelink to every image on Wikimedia Commons.
The subject at hand in this email thread is that instead of creating an article, the user
ThurnerRupert made a redirect in the German Wikipedia called "afrikanische
Pflaume" that links to "Prunus" and expected to be able to interwikilink
this redirect via the Wikidata item for "African Plum" to the French
Wikipedia's article for "safou". I would say that Wikidata should not
support this workflow and it is incorrect editing behavior. This has nothing to do with
the numbers of redirects or whether or not they need to be deleted by anybody.
Jane
On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 6:09 PM, P. Blissenbach <publi(a)web.de> wrote:I do not mind
having huge numbers of redirects at all, but you must be aware that there are wikipedias
the powers of which will stubbornly and customarily delete such redirects when you create
them. So that cannot be a solutiion for all.
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