Hi.
Is there an established policy on the English Wikipedia as to what sort of Redirects should or should not exist?
I used to maintain the point of view that having redirects all over the place (as long as they always go to the intended article) can never do any harm, and in fact they keep the pages accessible under old links (i.e. deleting them would break links elsewhere on the Internet).
However, I remember having an argument about this on the German Wikipedia mailinglist a few months back, and it seemed that their prevailing view was that redirects should only exist in places where a paper encyclopedia would have an item saying "see: XYZ", lest they clutter up the "All articles" Special page.
What is the view of the English Wikipedia in this regard? Currently there seem to be a lot of redirects that seem redundant, but as I said, my view on this is that they do not do any harm.
As an example, should the following page be deleted or kept?
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Sozialdemokratischen_Partei_Deuts...
because the actual German name of the party is "Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands", not "Sozialdemokratischen" - that is an inflected form (genitive or dative).
Or how about wrong spellings, should these be kept? e.g. http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Condoleeza_Rice&redirect=no http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Condolezza_Rice&redirect=no
And what about ancient subpages, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Star_Trek/BElanna_Torres&redi...
Thanks, Timwi
Timwi wrote:
Is there an established policy on the English Wikipedia as to what sort of Redirects should or should not exist?
See *http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirect *http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirects_for_deletion#When_should_w... *http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy/redirects *http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy/redirects/Archi... *http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:AKFD/redirect
Basically, broken links are bad but sometimes a redirect is worse than broken link.
Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands is also a redirect on the German Wikipedia, so I'd see no reason to delete it.
Angela.
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I used to maintain the point of view that having redirects all over the place (as long as they always go to the intended article) can never do any harm, and in fact they keep the pages accessible under old links (i.e. deleting them would break links elsewhere on the Internet).
I think some sort of technological solution (hopefully a light-weight one) is needed to fix that problem. There seem to be two main types of redirects:
1. Titles under which one might reasonably expect to find an article in an encyclopedia, but which redirect elsewhere because there are multiple legitimate names for the same concept. An example is [[United States]] vs. [[United States of America]]: both are legitimate names, but obviously the article should only be at one or the other. Same with scientific vs. common names of many organisms, and so on.
2. Titles that should not exist in an encyclopedia, either because they are misspellings, just kind of ridiculous, simple variations of capitalization, or something else, but which might conceivably be searched for. This also includes old names, like the former subpage naming mechanism.
Clearly these two types of redirects serve useful, but different purposes. We might want those in 1. to show up in allpages with a "See [blah]", but perhaps we wouldn't want those in 2. to do so.
Would it be possible to implement some sort of mechanism whereby a redirect can be flagged as merely a convenience or technological measure, not a legitimate alternate article title?
Of course, this may lead to some argument over what is legitimate, but I think there are a great deal of obvious cases of not legitimate names that this could take care of (like all the former subpages, misspellings, or variations on capitalization).
-Mark
delirium@rufus.d2g.com wrote:
I used to maintain the point of view that having redirects all over the place (as long as they always go to the intended article) can never do any harm, and in fact they keep the pages accessible under old links (i.e. deleting them would break links elsewhere on the Internet).
Would it be possible to implement some sort of mechanism whereby a redirect can be flagged as merely a convenience or technological measure, not a legitimate alternate article title?
A *very long time ago* I suggested we implement sysnonyms of the REDIRECT keyword, that would indicate the type: #MISSPELLING #DEPRECATED for subpages, etc and plain old #REDIRECT would correspond to a "see also" entry.
tarquin wrote:
A *very long time ago* I suggested we implement sysnonyms of the REDIRECT keyword, that would indicate the type: #MISSPELLING #DEPRECATED for subpages, etc and plain old #REDIRECT would correspond to a "see also" entry.
If you do do this, please deprecate #REDIRECT and use (say) #SEE instead. Otherwise it will be very difficult to find redirects that have not already been considered.
In other words, "#REDIRECT" should mean "redirect, but someone should look at this and decide whether it's #SPELLING, #SUBTOPIC, or #SEE". Especially the move function should use this (unless, of course, you also extend that and let the mover choose).
I'm suggesting #SPELLING instead of #MISSPELLING so it can encompass both misspellings and alternate spellings/capitalisations.
Timwi
On Tuesday, December 23, 2003, at 01:46 AM, Timwi wrote:
In other words, "#REDIRECT" should mean "redirect, but someone should look at this and decide whether it's #SPELLING, #SUBTOPIC, or #SEE". Especially the move function should use this (unless, of course, you also extend that and let the mover choose).
It would be nice, for some or all redirect directives, to put the redirectee under the redirector in search results. Consider the following search result for "USA":
8. _USA_ (27 bytes)
I'd suggest this be displayed as:
8. USA see _United_States_ (X bytes)
Looks nice, feels nice, and it doesn't look like the article is only 27 bytes long. This also opens the door (at least conceptually) for "see also" links in the style of inter-language links. Has this come up before?
BTW, why is it so hard to find the article 'United States' by title? A search for ' "United States" ' doesn't bring it up...
Peter
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