"Ilmari Karonen" nospam@vyznev.net wrote in message news:4595A54D.2070803@vyznev.net...
Plyd wrote:
To the proposition given by Steve, I would add "Correct all double redirects", to prevent not wanted pages to be re-redirected automatically.
Like this :
- Poker/Hands (linked 1 time - [[correct]])
- Ace-to-six low (linked 3 times - [[correct]])
- Deuce-to-seven low (linked 7 times - [[correct]])
[[Correct double redirects for these pages]]
That actually sounds like the best solution so far. Maybe with a checkbox for each redirect, like on [[Special:Undelete]] or [[Special:Watchlist/edit]]?
Another solution is for MW to be a bit cleverer, and to follow double (triple/quadruple/whatever) redirects automatically, which would make this a non-issue.
To fix the speed issues involved in following these redirects when they are encountered, the actual target of the redirect could be cached in the DB (and this might be useful to do for other reasons too, e.g. http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6934).
If an infinite loop is encountered the whole loop should be logged to the DB in a 'recursive redirects' table, and shown on an associated redirect page to be fixed. If a user visits one of the pages in the loop then no redirects are followed and the requested page is shown, with a suitable error message allowing them to fix it there and then.
As far as I can see, from a user-interface point of view this is the ideal solution to this and several other problems (I've always wondered why the software doesn't handle double-redirects properly). I don't know whether the reason for only allowing single redirects is technical or just historical, however I'm sure that if there are technical reasons they can be overcome with a bit of creativity.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)