On ven, 2002-04-12 at 20:03, Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Brion L. VIBBER wrote:
- Bipolar
disorder/An older, deprecated, version of this page [now a
redirect, but nobody's going to want to type all that into their
browser!]
- Harry Potter/Quidditch [moved to Quidditch (Harry Potter)]
- Harry Potter/broom [still has info but totally irrelevant and
duplicated in the Quidditch entry]
Personally, I would really, REALLY, prefer that these kinds of pages be
made redirects, *not* deleted outright.
I agree. One of the cardinal rules of good web practice is to try not
to break old urls if people may still be using them somehow.
OK... so NOTHING ever gets deleted EVER... I won't bother trying to
suggest it then. BTW that first page title is the ACTUAL PAGE TITLE...
nobody's going to search for that or link to that! Are they?????
Maybe, maybe not. That *particular* one might well be a candidate for
deletion, but I would definitely *not* delete [[Harry Potter/Quidditch]]
or [[Harry Potter/broom]].
What happens when you run out of room for new entries
because there are
a million useless redirects clogging up the database?
We all pitch in a dollar and buy Jimbo a bigger hard drive. :)
And how about when
you do a search and you get 100 entries, but 59 of them are merely
redirects?
(You answer this in your next paragraph.)
Also how about the redirects that take you to a
redirect
which redirects you some place else? Surely it would be simpler and
easier to be able to clear away some of the debris and to just have
ONE... I think that all of these trails of redirects are making the
project appear less professional and less useful than it might.
Clearly we need better tools for handling redirects; a semi-automated
point-all-redirects-to-the-new-page function would be helpful in this
regard. But I'd rather see a redirect that I have to click on to follow
the rest of the way than "Describe the new page here."
If you really want to keep all of this useless garbage
then I'd suggest
you need to find a way to keep the redirects OUT of search results
because it's making them look like a mess, and much harder to actually
use.
Yes! I agree wholeheartedly. Redirects should only turn up in searches
if they point to a page that didn't come up in the search already, and
probably should go last even then.
Actually, in an ideal world the search routine would
have options - so
you could search just headers, or just bodies or both, and choose terms
to include/exclude to help get the result you were looking for.
It would also be nice to have the option to search talk and user pages;
every once in a while that could come in handy.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)