I can't see anything that edit pages could return other than 200 OK, the issue is with redlinks, since they don't actually link to what you would expect, the article (which doesn't exist and should return 404), they link to the edit page (which does exist, so should return 200). Could redlinks somehow return a 307 Temporary Redirect to the edit page, rather than linking there directly? The issue is determining when to redirect to the edit page and when to simply return a 404 - could the referer be used for that? If you've followed a link from the wiki, it should go to the edit page, if you've got there any other way (link from external site or typing in the url) you should get the 404. I'm not sure if treating a URL differently based on the referer would be against the standards.

But the "Edit this page" link points to the &action=edit too, but that certainly shouldn't return any kind of error code, since it does exactly what it says on the tin. That would be doing away with the "No page by exists by this title" page completely - do we want to do that? Really, you need a new section for Web 2.0 - at the moment, there is very little support for user generated content (there's "Created" and "Accepted" (202 and 203 give or take)). We need a "content requested" code, or something.

2008/1/26, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>: But how about edit pages of pages that do exist? Surely those are very similar to edit pages of pages that don't exist, but I don't see any logic in making THOSE 404s. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

2008/1/26, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>: One easy solution would be to introduce a new action - e.g. "create" - that's entirely synomymous with "edit" except for the status code returned and that gets used on red links and red links only. -- schnee

On Jan 26, 2008 2:01 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Web crawlers should note that it is a page which is excluded by robots.txt. It's not a broken link, it's a valid link, just one which is not meant for robots. User-agent: * Disallow: /w/

On 26/01/2008, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: On wikis were anon page creation is blocked (which is far from every wiki - it may well be a minority), yes, I guess 403 would be correct (and for blocked users, anon users on wikis completely closed to anon editing, protected pages... only issue with some of those is that they're temporary, does 403 meant to be used for temporary restrictions?).

On Jan 25, 2008 6:11 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: For what it's worth, LiveJournal's used the "huge HTML comment" hack for error pages for a long time without (as far as know) problems. Examine e.g. http://news.livejournal.com/friends/nonesuch -- hopefully you see the server-provided error text on all browsers. (But the user reach is much less than Wikipedia and it's not as important that this text is displayed as Wikipedia's is.) Personally, I'd love it if Wikipedia had more informative error codes. My understanding is that Googlebot has use all sorts of heuristics to guess at whether a given page is "actually" a 404 or not, and heuristic guessing is what got us into the above mess in the first place. You might find it amusing to use Code Search to search for the string "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name" to see others who've been confronted with this problem: http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Wikipedia+does+not+… (Of course, none of those solutions work for non-English wikis...) Another, more complicated instance of this is observable at http://www.google.com/search?q=nitty+gritty , where result #6 is: "Nitty gritty - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Wikipedia does not currently have an encyclopedia article for Nitty gritty. You may want to search Wiktionary for "Nitty gritty" instead. ..." If that were instead a redirect, Google could pick up the useful Wiktionary article rather than the useless Wikipedia page.

On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 09:08:58PM +0000, Thomas Dalton wrote: Check this list's archives; early 07, I think. I posited that sugestion, and was carefully talked down; it took a few messages to convince me that "real" redirects were a Bad Idea, but they did, in fact, manage it. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274 Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. -- (Joseph Stalin)