Tim Starling wrote:
Personally, I think the refresh is annoying, since it makes it much more difficult to correct typos in manually-typed URLs. If you actually meant to type some non-article URL like a CSS resource, and make a typo which causes it to hit the refresh, the URL you typed is erased from your browser's address bar and history, making correction of the typo much more difficult. Maybe we should just include a link to the search page, rather than redirect or refresh.
Mark Ryan redesigned the 404 page in 2009 and specifically removed the meta refresh tag (cf. https://bugs.wikimedia.org/17316#c0).
The redesigned page eventually got deployed, but the client-side refresh very sneakily moved from the HTML output to a Refresh header (cf. https://bugs.wikimedia.org/35052#c0).
Neither bug is resolved, if anyone is interested in helping out. :-)
MZMcBride