[WikiEN-l] Tool announcement: Alternative names redirect

[Steve Bennett]

On 10/22/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
>
> True. Although we could do it with no database changes if we just go
> through and update the existing redirects on page save. I think I'd only


My first reaction is that that's kludgy. I guess the downsides are
that you end up with actual redirect pages, and lots of them,
inflating our page count, and possibly other bad things.

go for something more interesting if we wanted to get rid of redirects
> altogether in favor of aliases. I haven't looked at the request routing,
> code, though, so maybe I'm just being a bit chicken.


Oh, I meant to mention, I assume this behaviour would take place after
all the other lookups:

Greater Melbourne
-> Greater Melbourne (fails)
-> greater melbourne (fails)
-> GREATER MELBOURNE (fails)
try the aliases...
etc.

I'm not sure what the long term role of redirects would be. You can't just
delete them because you lose history...though IMHO the history isn't doing a
lot of good sitting on a dusty redirect somewhere.

Hmmm... There I'd be worried about people not finding it. Probably
> better to do actual user testing, but my guess is that sticking it in at
> the top is the best easy implementation.


Yeah, we'll have to see how it works out in practice.

I think both should just refuse to save with error messages, sort of
> like the behavior now if you ask it to nag you about edit comments.


Well, it's unlike any behaviour - MediaWiki *never* refuses to save
because of bad syntax.

Alternatively, it could behave like most other mangled wikimarkup and
> just render it as plain text if it doesn't like it. Although that's more
> consistent with the current model, I think the not-visible-on-the-page
> nature of redirects would make that approach wrong for #ALIASES.


I think that would be ok. At least you know you've done something
wrong and will fix it...or someone else will. It's more difficult if
the #ALIASES line is syntactically valid, but illegal due to too many
expansions.

That's a great point.
>
> Would we need a little more in the syntax to suggest whether blocks
> could be optional?


IMHO:

A [Foo] Bar = A Foo Bar, A Bar
A [Foo|Moo] Bar = A Foo Bar, A Moo Bar
A [Foo|Moo|] Bar = A Foo Bar, A Moo Bar, A Bar
A [[Foo|Moo]] Bar = same as previous, but discouraged.

It keeps the total syntax down to three elements: [], |, and an escaping
mechanism, presumably \. Fortunately [, ], | and \ are all extremely
uncommon in (Wikipedia) page titles.


> Yeah, it would be a departure for sure. On the other Wiki-driven project
> I've been working on, which we coded from scratch, we've been adding
> more JavaScript UI for metadata and it has been a big hit, especially
> for things that have complicated structure.


Hit in what sense?

Anyway, I'll propose this on Wikitech and see what they have to say. It's
easy to say that it could be implemented, but I haven't hacked on the
MediaWiki code.

Steve