[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wiktionaries for all!

[Timwi]

Tim Starling wrote:

> An extra feature 
> has been added to MediaWiki allowing "diagonal" linking, with the help 
> of redirects. A link reading [[wikt:fi:kukkala]] on the German Wikipedia 
> will link to http://de.wiktionary.org/fi:Kukkala, which will redirect to 
> http://fi.wiktionary.org/Kukkala .

I'm not sure that is such a good idea, performance-wise... ideally, it 
should go straight to the correct URL. People would otherwise constantly 
use "Copy link to clipboard" on these links and fill the web with 
nonsense links like http://de.wiktionary.org/fi:Kukkala, and we would 
forever have to keep the redirects working. They are starting to become 
a little difficult to keep track of, and I'm afraid it's only a matter 
of time until we will inadvertantly create an infinite loop of redirects 
somewhere.

In general, redirecting mechanisms should probably be revised to 
redirect straight to the correct place.

What is the longest chain of redirects we have so far?...
        http://wikipedia.com/wiki/de:a
302 -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:a
302 -> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/a
301 -> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A

So there are three things I see that are wrong here:

1. Those redirects should all be 301s, not 302
2. All of those URLs should 301 directly to
    http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A
3. Nothing should link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:a (but a
    [[Wikipedia:de:a]] link on en.wiktionary.org would, according to what
    you said, causing two unnecessary redirects for every visitor that
    clicks on the link).

For those who don't already know what's so bad about redirects: (1) Even 
just one redirect doubles(!) the server's response time. That is 
extremely noticeable when the servers are slow, which they are almost 
always. (2) They cost Wikimedia an extra bit of bandwidth. I know this 
is pretty miniscule, but at the rate that we seem to be creating new 
redirects, it's going to make quite a difference pretty soon. (3) I'm 
not sure about this one, but I would imagine that they are detrimental 
to the Google ranking of the linked-to page.

Greetings,
Timwi