Timwi wrote:
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.
One chief reason for making these links available is to allow interwiki
linking from *non-wikimedia* wikis as well. By using a single
established prefix (WikiPedia:) you can link to any of our languages
without begging third party site admins to add three hundred prefixes to
their interwiki maps.
It would be nice to use the "real" URLs directly on our own wikis, of
course, for the reasons you mention.
In general, redirecting mechanisms should probably be
revised to
redirect straight to the correct place.
Timwi makes several good points I agree with about cleaning up the
functioning of the redirects to be cleaner and cacheable.
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's not exactly true; the redirect bounce doesn't require rendering,
and if appropriately set up can be cached at the squid level. However,
the _best case_ time is doubled, where the best case time is a 301
redirect response followed by a 304 not modified, all based on caching,
with no content needing to be rendered or transferred or anything looked
up in a database. That should be pretty fast anyway. ;)
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)