On 8/11/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
We should have a FAQ for this. :)
/me digs up an old response
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-November/032619.html
Ok, that actually makes sense. Summarising: You have two options. Either:
a) It hard redirects you, and there's absolutely no link back to where you came from. Very bad for maintenance, working on the redirect itself etc. b) It redirects you, but leaves the link back to the original redirecting page. But the only way to make that work is to have a parameter on the URL, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W_Bush&redirectedfrom=George_Walker_..., which totally kills the point of the whole exercise (having a clean URL).
The one suggestion I might make would be adding a *forward* link as well as a backward link. So, when you get soft-redirected like that, you would end up with a link to the actual page (without the backwards redirect. Maybe that's what I'm missing. It'd just be convenient if there was a way to get to the actual page, in order to bookmark it or copy the URL or something. Currently I end up copy-pasting the title into the navigation box.
Steve