[Wikipedia-l] a couple of pages to delete

[Brion L. VIBBER]

On ven, 2002-04-12 at 20:03, Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > Brion L. VIBBER wrote:
> > > > - Bipolar disorder/An older, deprecated, version of this page [now a
> > > > redirect, but nobody's going to want to type all that into their
> > > > browser!]
> > > > - Harry Potter/Quidditch [moved to Quidditch (Harry Potter)]
> > > > - Harry Potter/broom [still has info but totally irrelevant and
> > > > duplicated in the Quidditch entry]
> > >
> > > Personally, I would really, REALLY, prefer that these kinds of pages be
> > > made redirects, *not* deleted outright.
> > 
> > I agree.  One of the cardinal rules of good web practice is to try not
> > to break old urls if people may still be using them somehow.
> 
> OK... so NOTHING ever gets deleted EVER... I won't bother trying to
> suggest it then. BTW that first page title is the ACTUAL PAGE TITLE...
> nobody's going to search for that or link to that! Are they?????

Maybe, maybe not. That *particular* one might well be a candidate for
deletion, but I would definitely *not* delete [[Harry Potter/Quidditch]]
or [[Harry Potter/broom]].

> What happens when you run out of room for new entries because there are
> a million useless redirects clogging up the database?

We all pitch in a dollar and buy Jimbo a bigger hard drive. :)

> And how about when
> you do a search and you get 100 entries, but 59 of them are merely
> redirects?

(You answer this in your next paragraph.)

> Also how about the redirects that take you to a redirect
> which redirects you some place else? Surely it would be simpler and
> easier to be able to clear away some of the debris and to just have
> ONE... I think that all of these trails of redirects are making the
> project appear less professional and less useful than it might. 

Clearly we need better tools for handling redirects; a semi-automated
point-all-redirects-to-the-new-page function would be helpful in this
regard. But I'd rather see a redirect that I have to click on to follow
the rest of the way than "Describe the new page here."

> If you really want to keep all of this useless garbage then I'd suggest
> you need to find a way to keep the redirects OUT of search results
> because it's making them look like a mess, and much harder to actually
> use. 

Yes! I agree wholeheartedly. Redirects should only turn up in searches
if they point to a page that didn't come up in the search already, and
probably should go last even then.

> Actually, in an ideal world the search routine would have options - so
> you could search just headers, or just bodies or both, and choose terms
> to include/exclude to help get the result you were looking for.

It would also be nice to have the option to search talk and user pages;
every once in a while that could come in handy.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)