On 2014-09-05 13:22, Jochen Topf wrote:
On Fr, Sep 05, 2014 at 12:51:40 -0700, Minh Nguyen wrote:
On 2014-08-28 04:37, Jochen Topf wrote:
Redirect pages can have a bad effect, though. Taginfo will show if a wiki page
exists for a key or tag. Taginfo can't know why there is a redirect. Is this a
case where the redirect directs from a "typo page" to the "real page" or is
this a case where, like in the maxspeed case, several pages for totally
good tags have been rolled into one. So taginfo shows them all the same and
might lead people into thinking the "typo key" is the real one, if they don't
click through to the page.
The problem behind this is that there is no way to mark the reason why there is
a redirect. It could be "old now discontinued name", or "common misspelling",
or "this page would be basically a copy of this other one, so look there", or
probably some other reasons. Redirects hide this information, that could be
written down on the page instead. So I think redirects should be avoided. In
particular, misspellings would be better handled by having a slightly fuzzy
search (not sure how good MediaWiki is for that).
At Wikipedia, templates are categorized using a series of templates like {{R
from misspelling}}. You just place them on the line following the #redirect
tag. Could taginfo be made to look for these templates or the categories
they sort into?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:R_from_misspelling
It could. But humans will not see anything in those redirect pages without
jumping through hoops, so I think this makes a bad situation even worse.
Redirect templates do add a human-readable message to the page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antartic_Treaty?redirect=no
However, you do have to click the "Redirected from" link to see that
message [1], and links to the redirect page show up as ordinary blue
links [2]. The latter problem can be addressed by adding this rule to
the wiki's MediaWiki:Common.css:
.mw-redirect {
background-color: #ddeeff;
}
To be clear, I'm not speaking out in favor of redirects for numeric tags
like maxspeed=20. {{tag|maxspeed||20}} is definitely the right way to
link to that tag. Rather, I see redirects as being useful for obsolete,
haven't-tagged-this-way-since-2004 tags, or for American English tags
where the British equivalent is preferred (e.g., amenity=theater).
Perhaps the obsolete and dialectal tags merit their own "soft redirect"
pages, in MediaWiki parlance, but a hard redirect is better than nothing.
[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/2012
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/42880
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