On 28/11/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
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.
Well, yes, I said I was; but I'm also basing it on the fact that those seemed very logical and reasonable confusions.
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).
It's not just a case of redirects "making sense" - when people want to reverse a decision to redirect, it should be as easy as other edits. So if someone decides that two terms *aren't* synonyms, or that a character isn't really that minor at all, they should be able to edit the pages appropriately - I know this argument's much abused, but this does seem rather central to being "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit". And the first step in changing the redirect is to know that the redirect exists in the first place - I'm not convinced people would even find a "what redirects here" list if they were unaware of what a redirect was (though, I guess that's why you suggested putting it on the edit page - so that there was a higher chance of them discovering it "by accident". Still, seems a poor substitute for just announcing the redirection clearly in the first place.)
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.
I guess the users I'm thinking of are those who are just about getting used to the basic principles of the wiki, and understand that [[foo]] should link to an article called "foo" - "how remarkably simple", they think... Then when they are presented with an article called "Meta-syntactic variable" instead, they are surprised - suddenly, the wiki is doing some kind of voodoo and interpretting what they say, rather than obeying it. They may not think of it as "a link to X redirecting the user to Y" at all - they'll just think they've misunderstood the basic "link by typing the title of the target page" philosophy.
So yeah, I guess they're the ones trying to figure out "how things work" - but only in as much as they're trying to participate, as they've been constantly invited to do since they first visitted the site.
Maybe, though, I'm over-compensating for my own system-logical mind (and experience with MediaWiki), and most new users *would* actually come to the correct conclusion with no clues other than consistently arriving at the "wrong" page; I'm not convinced, though.
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.
Well, I sort of see your point, though I'd point out that you don't have to "join" anything in order to edit Wikipedia, you just click "edit this page", so the transition from reader to editor is a very subtle one in some senses. But yeah, I'll accept that "redirected from" notices aren't that important to readers - assuming editors are clever enough with their introductions that the redirects *do* make sense - but as soon as you turn editor, you absolutely need to know what's going on.
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.
There was a discussion along those lines a while ago (either on this list or mediawiki-l, I forget which), which got rather confusing, to the extent that I'm still not sure if there might be a feasible middle way on this...
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]