On ven, 2002-04-12 at 20:03, Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Brion L. VIBBER wrote:
- Bipolar disorder/An older, deprecated, version of this page [now a
redirect, but nobody's going to want to type all that into their browser!]
- Harry Potter/Quidditch [moved to Quidditch (Harry Potter)]
- Harry Potter/broom [still has info but totally irrelevant and
duplicated in the Quidditch entry]
Personally, I would really, REALLY, prefer that these kinds of pages be made redirects, *not* deleted outright.
I agree. One of the cardinal rules of good web practice is to try not to break old urls if people may still be using them somehow.
OK... so NOTHING ever gets deleted EVER... I won't bother trying to suggest it then. BTW that first page title is the ACTUAL PAGE TITLE... nobody's going to search for that or link to that! Are they?????
Maybe, maybe not. That *particular* one might well be a candidate for deletion, but I would definitely *not* delete [[Harry Potter/Quidditch]] or [[Harry Potter/broom]].
What happens when you run out of room for new entries because there are a million useless redirects clogging up the database?
We all pitch in a dollar and buy Jimbo a bigger hard drive. :)
And how about when you do a search and you get 100 entries, but 59 of them are merely redirects?
(You answer this in your next paragraph.)
Also how about the redirects that take you to a redirect which redirects you some place else? Surely it would be simpler and easier to be able to clear away some of the debris and to just have ONE... I think that all of these trails of redirects are making the project appear less professional and less useful than it might.
Clearly we need better tools for handling redirects; a semi-automated point-all-redirects-to-the-new-page function would be helpful in this regard. But I'd rather see a redirect that I have to click on to follow the rest of the way than "Describe the new page here."
If you really want to keep all of this useless garbage then I'd suggest you need to find a way to keep the redirects OUT of search results because it's making them look like a mess, and much harder to actually use.
Yes! I agree wholeheartedly. Redirects should only turn up in searches if they point to a page that didn't come up in the search already, and probably should go last even then.
Actually, in an ideal world the search routine would have options - so you could search just headers, or just bodies or both, and choose terms to include/exclude to help get the result you were looking for.
It would also be nice to have the option to search talk and user pages; every once in a while that could come in handy.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)