Thomas Dalton wrote:
It would be really nice if redirects were replaced by a system of aliases, which were part of the metadata to the article. [...] In fact the expression language would only need one feature: multiple options for parts of a word, preferably nested. So the above example could actually be expressed:
Fr[é|e]deri[que|c] [Fran[ç|c]ois|] [Leblanc|Gonzale[z|s]] [Jr[.|]]
Not so abusable. Very useful. Any takers to implement it? :)
Shouldn't be too hard to implement as long as you don't mind it taking half an hour to load each page as the code has to check every article in the database to see which have an alias which matches whatever you typed in/clicked on.
Technically, that's not necessary.
You know that these things only change on save, so at that point you look at the difference between the old aliases and the new and update the master set. Computationally, it's only a smidgen more expensive than our current approach. And given that we're such a read-heavy environment, unnoticeably so.
(And that's without addressing the issue of duplicates. A redirect can only point to one article, a given string can match the regexps in many articles. Automated disambig pages, perhaps?)
That'd be a great way to solve that. And the main bit could be done as automatically updating our redirect pages. As a first pass, anyhow.
From a user experience perspective, I'd be a little worried about putting more mysterious Wiki markup at the top of a page. On another wiki I'm working on, we're moving more of this metadata outside the markup and to specialized UIs, so that it doesn't clutter the edit box.
I think the only real abuse potential comes from either putting in a giant list or trying to redirect in a bunch of existing articles. But one you can catch with a size limit, and the other you could fix by refusing to mess with real articles.
So Steve, I'd say it's a great idea. However, I'd want to do some user testing. Since I've been doing regular expressions for so long, they make instant sense to me, but even this limited version might be too mysterious for most of our editors. Perhaps the special UI would show them the list of generated alternatives as they edit?
William