You are gravely misunderstanding the importance of that redirect message: * Used to understand if you clicked a direct link or a redirect. (It's quite confusing to click two different links, and see the same page without knowing what is a redirect) * The redirect notifies that you came from a redirect, without it you can pish links using a #REDIRECT and unless the person checks the source or title for what the actual article's name is they don't know they were directed to somewhere they weren't supposed to be. * The redirect message's link is also used by many sysops and other users as a means of getting to the original redirect page for means of editing it or deleting it. ** Actually, if you go and remove that message, you remove the ability for anyone to directly go to a redirect page to do anything to it without manually adding a &redirect=no to the url in a way they shouldn't be required to do. Thus removing a important feature of MW.
All browsers keep track of clicked links, but changing links like these hardly seams intuitive just for the sake of a few differently colored links. Especially when after awhile most browsers will probably clean some of them out, and they aren't used heavily by average users for long term purposes.
And worldwide cache space... Bah... Articles are updated constantly and need re-caching a lot, a few duplicates is hardly anything. You're exaggerating the issue to much.
~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of: -The Gaiapedia (http://gaia.wikia.com) -Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG) -and Wiki-Tools.com (http://wiki-tools.com)
jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
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:
- [[ADSL]]
- [[Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line]]
- [[Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line|ADSL]]
which produce
<a href="/wiki/ADSL" class="mw-redirect" title="ADSL">ADSL</a>
<a href="/wiki/Asymmetric_Digital_Subscriber_Line" title="Asymmetric
Digital Subscriber Line">Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line</a>
- <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.
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