RedirectingPage

Given the people (myself included) sometimes Wikify words for effect, rather than with any real intent of them becoming pages, I don't think this would be overly helpful... - Kazuhiko

Well, it'd be nice for when you want to fill something out but can't think of a topic.  It took me ages to find the [UnReified Links] page.

Surely that's an argument for putting a link to UnreifiedLinks somewhere more prominent rather than creating a second list of links that's as hard to find as the first one? - MoonShadow

#REDIRECT TargetPage

The redirections are all very well, but don't they cause the wiki to become less linked, eg. Although the pages found [here] will redirect to CollectableCardGame they arent found [here] on the CollectableCardGame search. - Hawk

Oooh yeah.  Title clicking won't give the full backlink list.  Although, to be fair, if you just inserted pages you wouldn't get it with just a single click either.

Yes, just if you do the redirection thing then you are encouraging people to continue to use the wrong link, whereas I normally quickly look for any UnreifiedLinks to check I'm linking to the right pages.  If redirects started to exist for eg typos then this checking wouldn't work (though hopefully such abuse would not happen).  Is there any way to make the backlink search fuller, maybe when you save a page with a redirect on it a note could be made for the target page to include that in the search directive?  That would probably turn into an ugly mess quite quickly though :-(  - Hawk

The search is currently just a simple text search. No indexes or state are retained on the server. I would need to write fairly hefty swathes of code to implement something like that. This does not put it out of reach, but does put it out of reach for any time soon. And it would need people to maintain the notes on the redirect pages, when people are already finding it enough trouble to maintain links between wiki pages that the redirect feature is required in the first place. - MoonShadow

Hmmm.  Do we get MoonShadow to make the wiki keep a list of "known aliases" to each page, then?  So that title-clicks can search for "either this page's name or any of its known aliases"?  Or would that be rather baaad for performance for about three different reasons?  --AC

No. We don't. That's patching over the problem and pretending it doesn't exist, rather than fixing it; a bit like redirecting pages are in the first place, in fact. - MoonShadow

Hmm... I think we have different understandings of what "the problem" is.  One key aspect of the "problem" to me is that people are likely to type either GameBoyAdvance? or GameboyAdvance, either CategoryHomepage or CategoryHomepage.  If busy bees like thee and me keep going around tidying up people's capitalisations, then people are likely to keep making the sloppy capitalisations one way or another.  Particularly new people, or people who aren't naturally pedantically CompSci the way we are.  I don't think we should make it a condition of participation on ToothyWiki that you never ever capitalise the "Boy" in GameboyAdvance (or always do).  Of course, I suppose one option is to just accept that there will always be tidying up to do, and not view it as a problem.  I'm amenable to that, I suppose.  --AlexChurchill

We already tidy up people's misspellings - perfect typing is not a condition for participation on the Wiki. Why not typos in links? Refactoring and tidying should be merciless - its purpose is to get rid of chaff, not create more. The alternative to tidying up by changing links is tidying up by creating redirect pages for all the different ways people spell and capitalise stuff - one "deals" with the problem in a way that increases the amount of metacontent stored on the server and needs extra support in wiki internal code, and one deals with it in a way that does not. - MoonShadow

OK, I've been convinced.  I propose then that we only leave a few redirects in place (CCG -> CollectableCardGame and suchlike); we take a proactive attitude to most duplicate pages (PomPoko etc) or UnreifiedLinks for which a Reified way of saying the same thing exists.  So most entries on the list of UnreifiedLinks become targets for correcting or refactoring the source page, rather than Reifying the destination.  Sound reasonable?  --AlexChurchill

Assuming there is a possible valid reified destination for the unreified link in question, that sounds reasonable to me. - MoonShadow

• Errors and typos in links are better fixed by changing the page that contains the link, not by reifying the mistyped link, unless you have something worthwhile to say that you need to create the mistyped page for.
  
• Pages that are a valid different way of saying the same thing should redirect.
  

These are the real problem.  I normally put something like [ToothyWiki:Cantabrigians Cantabrigian] in order to get round it, but a number of people don't.  I guess the question is, does the gain from this kind of link being reifed by redirects outweigh the loss of back links? - Hawk

It's interesting to see the WikiPedia / MediaWiki? approach to this. They do correct links to bypass redirects, but they also have the backlink search know what's a redirect and include backlink searches for those pages too. So [the backlink search] for FullMetalPanic! (using its correct title including exclamation mark) also finds the RedirectingPage "Full Metal Panic" page without exclamation mark, and all links to that. I'd be interested to see if anyone's back-ported this MediaWiki? feature into UseModWiki. --AlexChurchill

Bear in mind that UseModWiki, unlike ToothyWiki, still does its searches like [this]. So unlikely, I would say. I could try adding code to the title indexing back end to make it work that way, given time. How much demand is there? - MoonShadow

True, I'd forgotten your search optimisations. I'm not hugely bothered at the moment, although it would speed up the process of finding certain pages. It's probably a NiceToHave? from my point of view. --AC

• Some links exist to get people places. It's OK for those to point to normal pages, redirects or nothing at all (UnreifiedLinks).
  
• Some links exist to categorise pages so that they can be navigated to (otherwise they'll probably never get visited again when they drop off the bottom of RecentChanges). These should *always* point to a page with content - if you see one that points to a redirect or an unreified link, that's an error that should be fixed.
  
• In the long term, redirecting pages should get eliminated by changing the links to them, unless they are things people are likely to search for.
  

Maybe a script could be written that searches pages for a given link and replaces it with the other link, instead of making a redirect you could add a word to the list of words that are automatically changed every night or whatever time interval is appropriate.  Bad point is it would be quite easy to wreck the wiki. - Hawk

The functionality exists. See MaintainMe. - MoonShadow

Despite my criticism I do think they seem like quite a good idea, but maybe someone could think of a better one :-) - Hawk

Type this into your address bar:

Or click on the link to the redirecting page name at the top of the target page.  It takes you to the editing page.