While the specifics may have changed over time, the general point of the page is correct -- "fixing" a redirect will use significantly more server time than clicking on one. When you click a redirect, MediaWiki queries the redirect table to see where you should go instead. Reads from the database like this are fast. However, when you edit the page to "fix" a redirect, MediaWiki has to save the edit, update the links tables, re-render the HTML, invalidate the cache, and serve the new HTML, among other things.
From a reader's perspective, there's no performance difference between
clicking a redirect and clicking any other internal link. We're talking milliseconds here, if that. If you wanted to really improve the performance of a page, remove all the images. (Note: do not do this.)
This falls under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_worry_about_performance: let the developers and the operations folk worry about performance. If you're already making an edit to an article and you feel like bypassing a few redirects, go ahead and knock yourself out. But going out of your way to "fix" links to redirects is just a waste of your time.
ACN
On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 11:23 PM Andreas Papacharalampous me@apap04.com wrote:
the page was created in 2006 [1], but i don't think it's up to date for 2020. the last couple of "constructive" edits were from 2006-2011 but i'm not sure.
--andreas
On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 11:11 PM Thibaut Payet thibaut120094@outlook.fr wrote:
Hi everyone,
On the French Wikipedia we're currently reworking our help page about redirects and some of us would like to include a section about common misconceptions, especially those described at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups/About_fixing_redirects&oldid=988508313.
However one user who's used to "fix" redirects is strongly opposed because "this page is from 2006" and it's "unsourced".[1]
So I would like to ask the sysadmins from Wikimedia and the MediaWiki developers who are following this mailing list: is this page created in 2006 still true and relevant in 2020?
Thank you.
-- Kind regards, Thibaut Payet [[User:Thibaut120094]]
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