Hey,
In general, the performance implications of an edit for fixing redirects
heavily outweighs the small improvement of removing a redirect.

The biggest exception to that is main pages of wikis (which redirecting
en.wikipedia.org to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_page actually wastes 27
years of Wikipedia readers time every month) [1] so if there is lots of
clicks coming for an article from another article (you can find those in
clickstream datasets [2]) this might be a good idea to fix but in general I
don't think so and it's even more work for the system to re-render the
page, update links table, etc.

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120085
[2] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/clickstream/

On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 3:06 AM Thibaut Payet <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Thank you very much for your detailed reply.
>
> We tried to convince our friend with your message and WP:PERF but he's
> still not convinced, he even created a RfC on frwiki which is currently
> being discussed[1] and we need some more information.
>
> He created these two pages:
> * <https://fr.wikipedia.org/?oldid=177832893&uselang=en> (list of
> redirections)
> * <https://fr.wikipedia.org/?oldid=177847552&uselang=en> (list of direct
> links)
>
> Previewed them and argue that the parser profiling data table shown
> below the page indicate that there's less CPU time/real time usage with
> the page using direct links than the one using redirects:
> "As surprising as it may seem, the page that gives the best result is
> the one with the direct links. Exactly the opposite of those who want to
> prohibit the fixes [note: we don't], it is precisely the direct links
> that give the best results. Go figure."[2]
>
> Does that kind of benchmark makes sense? Is the parser profiler data
> even relevant here? What exactly is calculated?
>
> Sorry for all these questions but we would be grateful if you could shed
> some light on this.
>
> Happy holidays,
> Thibaut Payet
> [[User:Thibaut120094]]
>
> [1] <https://fr.wikipedia.org/?curid=13767430&uselang=en>
> [2] <https://fr.wikipedia.org/?diff=prev&oldid=177855343&uselang=en>
>
> On 24.11.2020 05:36, AntiCompositeNumber wrote:
> > While the specifics may have changed over time, the general point of
> > the page is correct -- "fixing" a redirect will use significantly more
> > server time than clicking on one. When you click a redirect, MediaWiki
> > queries the redirect table to see where you should go instead. Reads
> > from the database like this are fast. However, when you edit the page
> > to "fix" a redirect, MediaWiki has to save the edit, update the links
> > tables, re-render the HTML, invalidate the cache, and serve the new
> > HTML, among other things.
> >
> >  From a reader's perspective, there's no performance difference between
> > clicking a redirect and clicking any other internal link. We're
> > talking milliseconds here, if that. If you wanted to really improve
> > the performance of a page, remove all the images. (Note: do not do
> > this.)
> >
> > This falls under
> > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_worry_about_performance
> >:
> > let the developers and the operations folk worry about performance. If
> > you're already making an edit to an article and you feel like
> > bypassing a few redirects, go ahead and knock yourself out. But going
> > out of your way to "fix" links to redirects is just a waste of your
> > time.
> >
> > ACN
> >
> > On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 11:23 PM Andreas Papacharalampous <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> the page was created in 2006 [1], but i don't think it's up to date for
> 2020. the last couple of "constructive" edits were from 2006-2011 but i'm
> not sure.
> >>
> >> [1]:
> https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation%20popups/About%20fixing%20redirects
> >> --andreas
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 11:11 PM Thibaut Payet <
> [email protected]> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi everyone,
> >>>
> >>> On the French Wikipedia we're currently reworking our help page about
> >>> redirects and some of us would like to include a section about common
> >>> misconceptions, especially those described at
> >>> <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups/About_fixing_redirects&oldid=988508313
> >.
> >>>
> >>> However one user who's used to "fix" redirects is strongly opposed
> >>> because "this page is from 2006" and it's "unsourced".[1]
> >>>
> >>> So I would like to ask the sysadmins from Wikimedia and the MediaWiki
> >>> developers who are following this mailing list: is this page created in
> >>> 2006 still true and relevant in 2020?
> >>>
> >>> Thank you.
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Kind regards,
> >>> Thibaut Payet
> >>> [[User:Thibaut120094]]
> >>>
> >>> [1]
> >>> <
> https://sigma.toolforge.org/usersearch.py?name=Alaspada&page=Discussion_aide%3ARedirection&server=frwiki&max=
> >
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
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> >>
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> >
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-- 
Amir (he/him)
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