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