On Tue, Dec
23, 2008 at 07:59, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
In r44919 I've gone ahead and reimplemented bug 2585, so a page view for
a nonexistent page will return a "404 Not Found" HTTP status code
instead of a "200 OK".
Do links of type http://**.wikipedia.org/wiki/redlink to nonexistent
articles really happen that often? They have to be typed by hand, or
otherwise they will be action=edit&redlink=1, which redirects to a
404ing page only in English Wikipedia and some other wikis, not
everywhere.
They happen when third parties link to an article that is later
deleted. When search engine crawlers follow such a link, the 404 will tell them it's a
dead link.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)