On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 02:58:09PM -0400, Steve Summit wrote:
Jay Ashworth wrote:
I, too, think it would be nice to make it as difficult as possible to bookmark a URL that's the *source* of a redirect, but...
That's really true only if the "source" is "wrong". It turns out it's not always wrong, which is yet another reason I think the current setup is the right compromise. (That is, we'll just have to find other ways to stamp out the "bad" links that result when people bookmark or otherwise use a truly "wrong" URL that we're actively trying to deprecate.)
Redirects are much more malleable, in my perception, than pages, and that's why I feel that bookmarking them is Not The Best Idea.
In many (perhaps most) of the current cases, redirects are used to create "aliases" for pages, and there really oughtn't be any stigma attached to linking to such an alias, if that makes more sense. For example, if I know that [[Los Angeles]] redirects to [[Los Angeles, California]], and if I'm writing in a context where it's unnecessary to remind my readers of the state, should I slavishly write [[Los Angeles, California|Los Angeles]], or should I rely on the redirect and just write [[Los Angeles]]?
That's an excellent question. How 'reliable' do you want your writing to be. When you find a redlink for which there "really" is a page, what do you do? Do you fix the link, or create a redirect?
Truly, one of the reasons these "alias" redirects exist is to make it easier on people creating wikilinks in naturally-flowing prose without having to use pipelinks all the time, so why not make use of them when they're there?
There's an argument on both sides, certainly.
I've recently come across two other cases in which I think it makes sense to deliberately link to a redirect.
Questionably-robust redirect partitioning. Suppose I need to link to the article about Vancouver, BC. It happens that, currently, plain [[Vancouver]] is about the Canadian city, and the U.S. city is at [[Vancouver, Washington]], and there's a disambiguation page at [[Vancouver (disambiguation)]], and [[Vancouver, BC]] redirects to [[Vancouver]]. So I could get away with just linking to [[Vancouver]].
But the Vancouver situation is (to me, at least) different from the Los Angeles one. There is and is only ever likely to be one Los Angeles, but the Vancouver situation feels much less absolute. I can imagine that, some ways down the line, someone might change plain [[Vancouver]] to be the disambiguation page. So I'd like to explicitly link to [[Vancouver, BC]], even if it means using the pipelink [[Vancouver, BC|Vancouver]], and even though it means linking to something which I know today to be a redirect. But, in this case, being explicit feels much more robust to me, doesn't leave me feel like I'm relying on today's coincidence (i.e. that plain [[Vancouver]] happens to be the one I want) to last forever.
So our disagreement is a difference in degree, not of sorts. Got it.
Clarifying "antiredirects". Just this morning, I was reading up about countable versus uncountable nouns. I tried [[Countable]], which redirects to [[Countable set]]. It turns out we do have [[Countable noun]], which is a redirect to [[Count noun]], which is another term some people use for what I think of as a "countable noun". But to make it easier on the next reader who happened to be interested in linguistic as opposed to mathematical countability, I edited [[Countable set]] to add
"Countable" redirects here. For the linguistic concept, see Countable noun.
at the top. Almost immediately someone changed it to
...For the linguistic concept, see Count noun.
noting that [[Countable noun]] is a redirect. But I think showing the link as [[Countable noun]] was (mildly) preferable in this case, because it explicitly shows the same word which the searcher who got redirected from [[Countable]] is looking for. It doesn't make too much of a difference in this case, but if the terms were more different -- if the searcher looked for [[Abc]] and got redirected to [[Abc d]] and was told that there was also an article on [[Xyz]], he might not realize that the [[Xyz]] link was worth following if what he thought he was looking for was [[Abc q]].
Well, if those "blah redirects here" things are *manual*, then there's another good reason: they're *wrong* if you came in to a page with multiple redirects pointing to it.
(Actually, I don't need to use that hypothetical Abc/q example, because I've got a real one right in front of me: at the same time I was playing with [[Countable set]], I also edited [[Uncountable set]] to include the similar legend "'Uncountable' redirects here. For the linguistic concept, see Uncountable noun". Now, [[Uncountable noun]] is actually a redirect to [[Mass noun]], but if the same change were made here -- if the legend said "For the linguistic concept, see Mass noun" -- it might be confusing.)
Which I think is another way to say the same thing.
The bottom line is if there's less reason to discourage linking to "wrong" titles (as I maintain), there's less reason to worry about showing the "wrong" URL in the address bar of a redirected-to page.
My perception is that the writers on a page assume it's called what it's really called, and that assumption may color what they write, in the way you suggest, and possibly in other ways that aren't obvious, both on WP and on private wikis... and the results of those problems may confuse *readers*, which is a couple/three order of magnitude worse problem... right?
[P.S. Personally, I think it would be good if articles could have alternate titles or "aliases" as a formally-supported concept, so that we could do away with the hordes of manually-maintained explicit redirects which simulate them, but that would admittedly be much more complicated on the implementation side, if "more convenient" on the user side.]
By which you mean that the article "could tell" that it had such and such aliases, in a way that it can't now?
Cheers, -- jra