On 6/29/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I say only redirect to an article if the article already contains some kind of substantial content about the subject the redirect is about. So if the author's page actually discusses the book in question go ahead and redirect, but if it doesn't then IMO it will only lead to confusion and frustration on the part of the reader.
Good point. It's a pity there is no way to add meta information about redirects. Sometimes it would be helpful to have something like "Foo is actually a slang term for Boo. Redirecting to Boo...". The alternative is trying to make sure that every article contains every major redirected term in bold in its first paragraph, which is rarely the case.
There have certainly been cases where I've been redirected without understanding why (usually because the topic is some synonym for some obscure point discussed in the 14th paragraph...) It's not obvious how to then fix the problem though - you almost need a "Topics discussed in this article" box up the top.
Unlike a real encyclopaedia, we don't seem willing or able to have incredibly short articles that say things like "Wreckage: temporary name given to English pop group Ibex in 1970. See [[Ibex (group)]]". You could never write "the perfect article" on a band which technically existed for 1 month, and whose most interesting characteristic is that Freddie Mercury broke it up shortly after forming it. But nor is simply redirecting to another topic altogether always a totally obvious thing for the reader to understand...
Steve