From: kband@www.llamacom.com
Yup, there are good counterarguments. The central one is that because the main wikipedia holds the vast majority of information on the site, most links are into the main site, no matter what section the page is in.
Yes, so?
Note also that if the change were turned on, all current links would need to be automagically changed.
No, it wouldn't. I've explained this a couple of postings ago. Because we would turn the switch that redirects links in a namespace that have no specified namespace to the same namspace. We only need to change the page titles and that can be done with a single SQL statement.
This is pretty wikitech, but e.g. on a user page, say there's a link to [[mind control]]. I don't want that to default to [[user:mind control]].
But this should be lower priority than fixing the many, many bugs the current software has.
We are working on that. Any bug you would like to go first?
Here's a short list.
#1 would be restoring the old wikipedia edit history, but I suspect that won't ever happen, so:
#2 www.wikipedia.com homepage doesn't recognize a user as logged in if you link to it from another site or type in the url; only once you go to a www.wikipedia.com/wiki/* page does it recognize you.
#3 Can't edit a redirected entry
#4 Edit conflict on re-direct to nonexistent page
#5 Edit conflict on using back button to edit some more
I recommend setting up a bugzilla.wikipedia.com to make life easier.
--tc