On Saturday 23 July 2005 21:49, Brion Vibber wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
I had an interesting conversation with Brion. We do not agree on everything. One of the things we do not agree on are redirects.
In my opinion, Wiktionary should not have redirects. A word is either spelled correctly and it will have its lemma or it is not and there will not be a lemma with the incorrect spelling. In Brions opinion there are links to lemmas and as we need to ensure that these links remain ok, we need redirects to make this possible.
The gap between my thinking and Gerard's thinking appears to be that Gerard considers redirects to be canonincal content; thus having a "wrong spelling" in a URL somehow implies that this is a "correct" spelling, which is therefore wrong and should be removed.
[...]
More generally, it's completely irresponsible for a web-based resource to rearrange content pages without providing a redirect from the old URL. This is a basic principle which applies just as much to Wiktionary as to Wikipedia, just as much to Hewlett Packard's driver web pages as to Slashdot postings, just as much to a database of autogenerated earthquake reports or a collection of press releases as to an online academic journal.
I, in fact, agree with both of you :) I agree that a web-based resource should have its URLs as permanent as possible, but I also think that in the UW it should be possible to specify in the database anything which was in traditional wiktionaries done with redirects.
A simple way to solve this could be to make redirects function differently than they usually do on MediaWiki: instead of silently displaying content of another page under the same URL, they could simply display "Contents of this page has moved to [[that page]]." Thatway, URLs would still exist and be useful, while there would be absolutely no danger of mistaking redirects for canonical content.