Brion Vibber wrote:
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.
On the other hand, your thinking is based on the assumption that without redirects, the URLs that people currently link to will stop working. This in turn is assuming that the Ultimate Wiktionary will replace the existing Wiktionaries at their current URLs, which according to my understanding of the plan isn't going to happen. Gerard said that UW will at first exist alongisde the existing Wiktionaries, and he also said that if the community will be in favour of keeping the existing Wiktionaries in operation indefinitely, then so be it.
Therefore, Ultimate Wiktionary is not going to be at en.wiktionary.org. Once we decide to scrap the old Wiktionaries, we can therefore easily have a RewriteRule to forward from capitalised [langcode].wiktionary.org to ultimate.wiktionary.org or whatever it will be (I would prefer just wiktionary.org).
However, this is not saying that I disagree with you, Brion; in fact, I quite agree that redirects should continue to exist, though for other reasons than yours. I don't see any point in having separate entries for "goes" and "went", or for "color" and "colour". This would be a tremendous undertaking for languages that are heavily inflected (http://verbix.com/webverbix/cache/31.etmek.html), and its usefulness to the reader is highly doubtful. At the same time, however, there is a need for disambiguation pages: If I browse to a word which exists in two languages, and in both languages it is an inflected form of another word, I need to be asked which of those words I meant.
Timwi