[Wikipedia-l] a couple of pages to delete

[Jimmy Wales]

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...

Well, I wouldn't go quite _that_ far. :-)

> 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?????

No, but some of those pages are already in the search engines, and receiving traffic.

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

Well, we'll never "run out of room" for new entries... disk space is
cheap and getting cheaper.

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

I think you have a very valid point.  OUR search engine should not
return links to redirects.  If redirects have an impact on our search
results at all, it should be to return pages that are the _object_ of
the redirect.  The redirects are ugly.

> 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. 

I agree.

> 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.

Yes, I agree with this, too.