Gentlemen, I am having a problem in that I am ending up reading the same articles over and over, only to get halfway through them before realizing "didn't I read something like this last month?"
How could that be? My browser (actually WWWOFFLE) keeps track of what links I've already clicked on. They will be in an "already clicked" color so I don't end up clicking again.
Ah, it is all because MediaWiki insists on calling the same article different names. Consider these three cases:
1) [[ADSL]] 2) [[Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line]] 3) [[Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line|ADSL]]
which produce 1) <a href="/wiki/ADSL" class="mw-redirect" title="ADSL">ADSL</a>
2) <a href="/wiki/Asymmetric_Digital_Subscriber_Line" title="Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line">Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line</a>
3) <a href="/wiki/Asymmetric_Digital_Subscriber_Line" title="Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line">ADSL</a>
I hereby propose input 1 now make output 3 instead of output 1.
'But what about the "(Redirected from ADSL)" message?' you ask.
Is that really all the big difference is? Seems so. Well, losing it would be a small price to pay vs. all the worldwide cache space and network traffic caused by the same article with many names needing a separate copy. Implementing this might even delay new hardware purchase needs a year.
Note that no, we are not asking the user to change their writing habits. They can still go ahead and use their favorite redirect names, the more the merrier. All we are doing is canonicalizing the HTTP link. As we see MediaWiki is quite aware (class="mw-redirect") that it is a redirect, we bridge the gap and remove the runaround by going further and linking directly.