[Pywikipedia-l] [ pywikipediabot-Bugs-2685388 ] interwiki bot shouldn't replace redirects

Wed Apr 1 09:59:03 UTC 2009

Bugs item #2685388, was opened at 2009-03-12 16:35
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by nobody
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Category: interwiki
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: interwiki bot shouldn't replace redirects

Initial Comment:
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:R#NOTBROKEN, links to non-broken redirects should not be fixed, thus e.g. this bot edit http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Extended_SMTP&curid=1064104&diff=276724386&oldid=276384777 (changing de link from redirect page to subsection) is not correct, and this behaviour should be fixed.

Pywikipedia [http] trunk/pywikipedia (r6506, Mar 11 2009, 17:54:39)
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Apr 18 2007, 08:51:08) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)]

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Comment By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Date: 2009-04-01 09:59

Message:
I think you cannot use -noredirect, because of this bug:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2555767&group_id=93107&atid=603138

hope it'd be easy to fix, and the "-noredirect" option will be back.

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Comment By: LouPeter (loupeter)
Date: 2009-03-18 07:31

Message:
At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Interlanguage_links on the subsection
"Bots and links to and from a section" is said:

... The activity of the bots also requires that interlanguage links are
only put from an article to an article covering the same subject, not more
and not less. It is technically possible to make an interlanguage link from
an article to a section of an article, just like any link to a section. The
bots can handle this. They will not try to link back from a section to the
articles that links to it. Maintaining this links by hand, however, is
complicated, so linking to a section is still not recommended. ...

So it seems not recommended but allowed. Maybe these kind of interwikis
should remain out of the bot activities and be maintained by hand.

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Comment By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Date: 2009-03-17 22:12

Message:
I think the two main points of WP:R#NOTBROKEN is that "fixing" these
redirects really doesn't help, and usually hides useful information.  In
the case of en:Extended_SMTP, the German wiki has it redirecting to a
section of SMTP.  All other languages have it as a separate article, and I
suspect the German wiki will eventually have that way also.  But, even
straight redirects are often useful to keep separate.  It is common to have
a single article which covers closely related topics "A" and "B" using a
generic name [[C]], with redirects of [[B]]->[[C]] and [[A]]->[[C]]. 
Another language may have those subjects in separate articles, keeping the
redirects lets both of them have inter-wiki links.

Rather than have a bot that "fixes" these redirects that aren't broken, it
would be nice to have a bot that went thorough and identified pipes that
are being used to avoid not-broken redirects.  Say, there is a link of
[[topic!altname]], with a redirect of [[altname]]->[[topic]], changing the
link to just [[altname]] would help things.

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Comment By: Mikko Silvonen (silvonen)
Date: 2009-03-17 16:28

Message:
Is anybody listening...? Other users are telling me that my bot violates
this convention on the English Wikipedia by replacing redirects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:R#NOTBROKEN

Or should I just start using the -noredirect option and ignore all the
misspellings in interwiki links?

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Comment By: Mikko Silvonen (silvonen)
Date: 2009-03-13 04:57

Message:
I got this wish also on my bot talk page.

In general it may be impossible to distinguish "good" redirect pages from
"bad" ones automatically (and my feeling is that most redirects encountered
by bots are the result of initially misspelled page titles), but could we
assume that redirects pointing to subsections are always good ones? I
haven't thought about all the consequences.

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You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=603138&aid=2685388&group_id=93107