Rowan Collins wrote:
A casual reader will not care if they are redirected between pages. An inexperianced editor _may_ wonder why they link to [[Foo]] and end up at [[Bar]]; some help entries can help on this if they don't already exist.
Actually, I would disagree with this rather strongly - a casual reader (or newbie editor, which we encourage to be the same thing) will generally be *very* surprised if they end up at a different page from the one they expected, precisely because they *don't* know what a redirect is. They may well not care that they're redirected between pages, but if they're not told that that's the case, *they will be confused*.
I think you're basing this on the helpdesk questions you've seen. Myself, I haven't ever seen such a question from a confused user, but then again, I don't monitor the various helpdesks we have regularly.
I can't really imagine that particularly many people would be surprised at redirects. Almost all redirects make sense. It makes sense for a misspelling to redirect to the correct spelling. It makes sense for synonyms to redirect to each other. And it makes sense for too specific a topic (e.g. a minor fictional character) to redirect to a general article (clearly titled "list of minor characters", in this example). I think the only people who are "surprised" are those who are actually trying to figure out how things work; those who wonder how Wikipedians told the system that a link to X should redirect the user to Y, as there's no obvious way of doing that.
In passing, I would also challenge your view that "we encourage casual readers and newbie editors to be the same thing" -- although we encourage everyone to join Wikipedia, it is still a product aimed at end-users who generally don't want to participate, so it makes sense to distinguish between the two.
At this point I was going to make a new suggestion, namely to have a textbox with "titles that redirect to here" on the edit page, rather than a list of links. Redirects would then be edited at the target title, not the redirect's title. I've realised, though, that this would make a lot of things more complicated. In particular, if you add a redirect and then the system tells you "Sorry, that title already redirects to [[somewhere else]]", you would then have to go to [[somewhere else]], remove the redirect and come back. You would also have to do that if you wanted to turn the redirect into a disambiguation page. Maybe the way it's done now is the best after all.
Timwi