[WikiEN-l] Tool announcement: Alternative names redirect

[Steve Bennett]

On 10/18/07, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Someone raised the possibility of a bot that would go through a
> category (of biographies), read all articles, find '''bold''' parts,
> check if these exist as a page, and create a redirect if not.
>
>
It would be really nice if redirects were replaced by a system of aliases,
which were part of the metadata to the article.

In particular, if you could do regular expressions, like:

Fr[ée]deri(que|c) (Fran[çc]ois)? (Leblanc|Gonzale[zs]) (Jr(\.)?)?

Obviously you'd want to place restrictions to cut down the number of
matches, but this would save a lot of tedious redirect creating.

In fact the expression language would only need
one feature: multiple options for parts of a word, preferably nested.
So the above example could actually be expressed:

Fr[é|e]deri[que|c] [Fran[ç|c]ois|] [Leblanc|Gonzale[z|s]] [Jr[.|]]

Not so abusable. Very useful. Any takers to implement it? :)

Steve