On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 1:49 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Before properly answering this question, it's
important to know how many
links we're talking about. If it's 5000, the fallout is probably
manageable; but if it's in the hundreds of thousands on any project (most
likely enwiki) there will be renting of garments and gnashing of teeth.
All those changes show up on people's watchlists, after all.
Yes, that's exactly what I'd like to avoid. The first batch of URLs which
is ready to go is small (~4K) but the full list is significantly larger and
many of those are used on multiple pages so the edit churn would be
non-trivial.
Please also ensure that if you're changing the
URL, it's not just a http
--> https swap, but that the new URL is tested to verify it lands on a real
page. There are no doubt plenty of bad links in amongst all those URLs -
even government websites rearrange themselves periodically - and replacing
a bad link with a more secure bad link is not really helpful.
Yes – part of this project on our side is setting permanent redirects not
just for the protocol but also for pages which have moved into a different
application. This is the other side of what Oliver Keyes was asking about
where there are a mix of legacy applications which are non-trivial to
rewrite but also many thousands of URLs where a simple regex could handle
both the protocol change and switching to the canonical item page in the
modern unified app instead of continuing to use a long-deprecated legacy
view. Internally we've been working to chunk that list of URLs into
patterns by application / project so they can be reviewed and tested in a
reasonable amount of time.
Chris