On 10/22/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
True. Although we could do it with no database changes if we just go through and update the existing redirects on page save. I think I'd only
My first reaction is that that's kludgy. I guess the downsides are that you end up with actual redirect pages, and lots of them, inflating our page count, and possibly other bad things.
go for something more interesting if we wanted to get rid of redirects
altogether in favor of aliases. I haven't looked at the request routing, code, though, so maybe I'm just being a bit chicken.
Oh, I meant to mention, I assume this behaviour would take place after all the other lookups:
Greater Melbourne -> Greater Melbourne (fails) -> greater melbourne (fails) -> GREATER MELBOURNE (fails) try the aliases... etc.
I'm not sure what the long term role of redirects would be. You can't just delete them because you lose history...though IMHO the history isn't doing a lot of good sitting on a dusty redirect somewhere.
Hmmm... There I'd be worried about people not finding it. Probably
better to do actual user testing, but my guess is that sticking it in at the top is the best easy implementation.
Yeah, we'll have to see how it works out in practice.
I think both should just refuse to save with error messages, sort of
like the behavior now if you ask it to nag you about edit comments.
Well, it's unlike any behaviour - MediaWiki *never* refuses to save because of bad syntax.
Alternatively, it could behave like most other mangled wikimarkup and
just render it as plain text if it doesn't like it. Although that's more consistent with the current model, I think the not-visible-on-the-page nature of redirects would make that approach wrong for #ALIASES.
I think that would be ok. At least you know you've done something wrong and will fix it...or someone else will. It's more difficult if the #ALIASES line is syntactically valid, but illegal due to too many expansions.
That's a great point.
Would we need a little more in the syntax to suggest whether blocks could be optional?
IMHO:
A [Foo] Bar = A Foo Bar, A Bar A [Foo|Moo] Bar = A Foo Bar, A Moo Bar A [Foo|Moo|] Bar = A Foo Bar, A Moo Bar, A Bar A [[Foo|Moo]] Bar = same as previous, but discouraged.
It keeps the total syntax down to three elements: [], |, and an escaping mechanism, presumably . Fortunately [, ], | and \ are all extremely uncommon in (Wikipedia) page titles.
Yeah, it would be a departure for sure. On the other Wiki-driven project I've been working on, which we coded from scratch, we've been adding more JavaScript UI for metadata and it has been a big hit, especially for things that have complicated structure.
Hit in what sense?
Anyway, I'll propose this on Wikitech and see what they have to say. It's easy to say that it could be implemented, but I haven't hacked on the MediaWiki code.
Steve