On 10/25/07, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
Sure, but my point is more that "It's Magic!".
Magic violates the Priciple of Least Astonishment.
What I've been proposing honestly doesn't strike me as particularly magical or astonishing. But creating bona-fide redirects now looks like it has other advantages.
Then again, I hadn't thought through the behaviour of what happens when you
[[link]] to an aliased term. Logically the behaviour ought to be:
- If a real page exists, link to that
- Otherwise, if a single alias matches, link to that.
- Otherwise, link to an automatic disambiguation page.
Will those be extensible, as category pages are? Based on the disambigs *I've* seen, assuming you can *do* that automatically may not be all that safe.
In what way are category pages extensible? You mean in the brief text at the top? I was envisageing automatic (probably better called dynamic) disambiguation pages as being completely generated on the fly. If you wanted to tweak something, you would replace it by a real disambiguation page. There are problems with this proposal.
This actually presents a few complexities, as links themselves are stored in
a links table, and would have to be updated if the aliases change. It's
also
not clear whether the third case above should be a red or blue link.
How is that handled with :Category:?
I'm not sure what analogy you're making exactly, but an interesting, weird and possibly relevant thing does happen with categories: linking to a category which contains articles, but does not itself exist as a "page" shows as a red, but functional link.
Some other issues that also occur to me:
- does template transclusion work on an alias? If not, why not?
Would it work on a redirect? If so, why shouldn't it work on an alias?
Yeah, there's no problem transcluding {{clr}} which redirects to {{-}}. Why not? Perhaps because the potential for damage (malicious or otherwise) is greater.
Yeah; there are *lots* of potential pitfalls, aren't there?
Are they design? Or merely implementation? Given that they don't seem to be problems for redirects, I suspect they're implementation.
Is there a way to get the good parts of this idea while sticking with redirects as the actual implementation?
I'll put my thinking cap on. There's a bit of a problem in terms of trying
to make whatever feature "fit in" with the existing MediaWiki feature set and general look and feel, behaviour etc. Is it ok to break that by using lots of javascript to list and edit redirects? Is it ok to write to a page other than the one the user is looking at? Is it ok to pop open a new window to facilitate the user editing multiple pages at once? Is it ok to generate code for a disambiguation page and ask the user to review it?
All of these things would be novel.
Steve