Steve Bennett wrote:
On 12/31/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
On 30/12/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
This user refuses to do the cleanup. Hope this helps.
Superb attitude.
With Wikipedia, and wikis in general, one of the basic principles is that if some improvement can be broken down into several different independent improvement work units, then it's fine to carry out one of those units and not the others. There's no shame in adding {{stub}} to an article, and leaving the job of recategorising it {{brazil-music-stub}} to someone else. I improved a page by renaming it. Someone else - preferably a bot - can do the mind-numbingly tedious job of updating double redirects.
True enough. The part one might disagree with is whether moving a page without fixing the redirects is in fact an improvement; undoubtedly it often is, but in many cases the improvement derived from, say, moving [[Polar bear]] to [[Polar Bear]] or [[Color]] to [[Colour]], or vice versa, is marginal at best, and, even if actually positive, probably still not enough to offset the cost of having broken redirects.
The rest of your post I do generally agree with. If something can be done well by bots, there's not need to have it done by humans. If something can be done well by MediaWiki itself, there's no need to have it done by bots. We're only discussing how to best implement it in MediaWiki -- and waiting for someone ("who, me?") to get off their ass and code it.
There are times when we want to leave double-redirects left intact? So that we're on the same page, we have redirects:
A->B
Page B gets renamed to C, creating a redirect at B:
A->B->C
Why would you want "some of the redirects left intact", ie, A still pointing to B?
Perhaps because you want to start a new article at B, and most of the redirects pointing to it should in fact continue to do so. (In such cases, C is often in fact "B (whatever)" or "B in whatever", or perhaps "B/archive_NN".)