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