Gerard Meijssen wrote:
I had an interesting conversation with Brion. We do not agree on everything. One of the things we do not agree on are redirects.
In my opinion, Wiktionary should not have redirects. A word is either spelled correctly and it will have its lemma or it is not and there will not be a lemma with the incorrect spelling. In Brions opinion there are links to lemmas and as we need to ensure that these links remain ok, we need redirects to make this possible.
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.
To my mind however, redirects are not content. They are metacontent: compatibility tools used to provide corrections, by sending a visitor to the correct page if they're using an outdated link.
In the case of a "misspelling" which has been moved to the correct spelling, this means a reference to the wrong spelling is automatically corrected when a visitor returns to that page. Not only is the visitor now brought to the correct location of the entry, but it's prominently labeled with the correct spelling at the top.
They do not imply that a "wrong" spelling is correct, but rather do the exact opposite. Gerard's argument for deleting redirects thus, in my opinion, fails.
More generally, it's completely irresponsible for a web-based resource to rearrange content pages without providing a redirect from the old URL. This is a basic principle which applies just as much to Wiktionary as to Wikipedia, just as much to Hewlett Packard's driver web pages as to Slashdot postings, just as much to a database of autogenerated earthquake reports or a collection of press releases as to an online academic journal.
Wiktionary has no special dispensation: if we want people to believe this is a legitimate resource which can be used and referenced, maintaining URL compatibility is a non-negotioable requirement.
When a wiktionary has made this move away from first character capitalisation, the interwiki and interproject links within the Wikimedia projects need to be fixed. After this, the redirects can in my opinion be removed.
This would be harmful to the project, as it would still break every such link that may exist offsite: * personal bookmarks * links from other sites * URLs published as references in papers or books * etc
Some online links will eventually be noticed and corrected. Others never will be. Offline links (printed as references in papers, etc) will be broken forever unless someone notices and recreates the redirect. (Unless Gerard comes and deletes it again. ;)
For a primarily web-based resource, it would be the height of unprofessional behavior to render something like 99% of our pages inaccessible from the URLs they've been at for years.
Deleting redirects is bad for our users, it's bad for anyone who wants to rely on our resources as reference works, it's bad for anyone who wants to link to our site, it's just plain bad.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)