On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 4:09 PM, Andrew Cates andrew.cates@soschildren.org wrote:
Sorry about this but I think it is a reasonable request for help..
Google seems to be delivering wikipedia URLs for pages with a 302 interwiki link eg
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=schools+wikipedia&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8...
gets en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SchoolsWP%3Aindex%3Ahome as the URL with
http://schools-wikipedia.org/ as content
As far as I can see interwiki redirects are no longer used by Wikimedia software which just delivers straight links to target off the wikipedia pages. So nothing links through the 302 but Google returns it anyway.
Anyway could we therefore disable the temporary redirects to fix this problem, or not serve them to Google or if there is some reason why the redirects have to stay, show Google perm redirects instead (it is not as if we will want the redirects to point at anywhere else)
This looks like a Google bug. I don't think we should just disable 302s to interwikis -- you shouldn't have to run MediaWiki (and know Wikipedia's interwiki link table) to be able to reliably link to things in the same way you can link to them on Wikipedia. Right now third-party software can do stuff like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1"> and replace $1 by user input, and it will work basically like [[$1]] typed on Wikipedia, and that's good.