[Moving responses to what seems to be a new thread - though it may just be a new subject line, GMail's broken at telling the difference.]
On 27/11/05, Jamie Bliss astronouth7303@gmail.com wrote:
Does that line provide the inexperianced/ignorant user with any information of value? (ignorant == "unaware of how MW works in this regard")
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*.
The chances of them finding a help page explaining this also seem rather slim - what would they search for? "Help:Pages which aren't called what you expect"?
IMHO, the information is rarely of value. Situations in which it is almost always involves editing and maintenance. I consider it unlikely of an anonymous and/or inexperianced editor wondering about this. (The true test is the various support channels.)
Well, you've hit the nail on the head there - the reason I am so confident in how new users will react is that I've seen their questions on the en.Wikipedia Help desk, things like "Whenever I try and look at page X, I end up at page Y instead! What am I doing wrong!?"
Indeed, this suggests that even our current label isn't doing its job well enough; for one thing - IMHO - Monobook makes it far too small and faint, as though we're ashamed of it and want to hide it among the "mechanics" of the UI.
On 26/11/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
I'm not convinced that you need to know which one you actually came through, especially if you have a list of all of them.
Well, I think it's important firstly to let users know that they *have* been redirected. Otherwise the wiki appears to be doing "magic" with links and page names, rather than being really straight-forward and easy to understand (even a piped link has the exact name of the target page written into it).
And secondly, the combination of piped links and redirects may mean you don't know *exactly* what page you *should* have ended up at, and it might not jump out of the list at you. So on a page with lots of redirects, you'd have to: 1) go "back" a page and find the link you clicked, hovering over it to discover the actual target in the tooltip 2) go "forward" (or click it again) 3) click "what links here" (or "edit this page", though I don't see why it would belong there) and possibly an extra button to get the "what redirects here" display 4) find the link back to the title discovered at step 1 to get at the redirect to edit/view comments in history/etc...
Or, of course, you could manually create a "redirect=no" URL after step 1, but that's hardly a user friendly interface. Maybe I'm making a meal of this, but it seems to me that's not all that unlikely a situation.
If you follow a link in an article and are redirected to a place you didn't expect to be redirected to, then looking at a list of "articles that redirect here" is doubly useful because you can fix other inappropriate redirects as well, not just the one you stumbled upon.
This is a good argument for power users, who understand how redirects work, and may even spot a redirect without any "redirected from" message - though I think even I would be slightly confused if the redirect was instant and invisible. But I'm not sure these are the only users who benefit from the current message, as explained above.
The whatlinkshere page could do with some improvement, though, and perhaps being able to separate the redirects from the "normal" links would be a useful feature to add to it.
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]