[Wikipedia-l] Wiktionary redirects (was Re: Wiktionaries for all!)

[Tim Starling]

Brion Vibber wrote:
> 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.

Brion is exactly right. The redirect mechanism was necessary for 
supporting external wikis. In time we may code a more efficient solution 
for local wikis. However there are glaring inefficiencies in MediaWiki 
which may be addressed first.

Note that this redirect feature was previously implemented in the apache 
configuration files using rewrite rules. There were no rewrite rules for 
Wiktionary, so instead of adding more, I generalised the mechanism by 
moving it to MediaWiki, taking advantage of the existing interwiki table 
to obtain URLs. Thus, it will now work on any wiki farm regardless of 
apache configuration. It will even work on wiki farms where the prefixes 
correspond to different directories under the same hostname.

-- Tim Starling