On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 1:49 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Before properly answering this question, it's important to know how many links we're talking about. If it's 5000, the fallout is probably manageable; but if it's in the hundreds of thousands on any project (most likely enwiki) there will be renting of garments and gnashing of teeth. All those changes show up on people's watchlists, after all.
Yes, that's exactly what I'd like to avoid. The first batch of URLs which is ready to go is small (~4K) but the full list is significantly larger and many of those are used on multiple pages so the edit churn would be non-trivial.
Please also ensure that if you're changing the URL, it's not just a http --> https swap, but that the new URL is tested to verify it lands on a real page. There are no doubt plenty of bad links in amongst all those URLs - even government websites rearrange themselves periodically - and replacing a bad link with a more secure bad link is not really helpful.
Yes – part of this project on our side is setting permanent redirects not just for the protocol but also for pages which have moved into a different application. This is the other side of what Oliver Keyes was asking about where there are a mix of legacy applications which are non-trivial to rewrite but also many thousands of URLs where a simple regex could handle both the protocol change and switching to the canonical item page in the modern unified app instead of continuing to use a long-deprecated legacy view. Internally we've been working to chunk that list of URLs into patterns by application / project so they can be reviewed and tested in a reasonable amount of time.
Chris