On 10/25/07, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com> wrote:
Sure, but my point is more that "It's Magic!".
Magic violates the Priciple of Least Astonishment.
What I've been proposing honestly doesn't strike me as particularly magical
or astonishing. But creating bona-fide redirects now looks like it has other
advantages.
Then again, I hadn't thought through the behaviour
of what happens when
you
[[link]] to an aliased term. Logically the
behaviour ought to be:
- If a real page exists, link to that
- Otherwise, if a single alias matches, link to that.
- Otherwise, link to an automatic disambiguation page.
Will those be extensible, as category pages are? Based on the
disambigs *I've* seen, assuming you can *do* that automatically may not
be all that safe.
In what way are category pages extensible? You mean in the brief text
at the top? I was envisageing automatic
(probably better called dynamic) disambiguation pages as being completely
generated on the fly. If you wanted to tweak something, you would replace it
by a real disambiguation page. There are problems with this proposal.
This actually presents a few complexities, as links
themselves are stored
in
a links table, and would have to be updated if
the aliases change. It's
also
not clear whether the third case above should be
a red or blue link.
How is that handled with :Category:?
I'm not sure what analogy you're making exactly, but an interesting,
weird and possibly relevant thing does
happen with categories: linking to a category which contains articles, but
does not itself exist as a "page" shows as a red, but functional link.
Some other issues that also occur to me:
- does template transclusion work on an alias?
If not, why not?
Would it work on a redirect? If so, why shouldn't it work on an alias?
Yeah, there's no problem transcluding {{clr}} which redirects to {{-}}. Why
not? Perhaps because the potential for damage (malicious or otherwise) is
greater.
Yeah; there are *lots* of potential pitfalls, aren't there?
Are they design? Or merely implementation? Given that they don't seem
to be problems for redirects, I suspect they're implementation.
Is there a way to get the good parts of this idea while sticking with
redirects as the actual implementation?
I'll put my thinking cap on. There's a bit of a problem in terms of trying
to make whatever feature "fit in" with the existing MediaWiki feature set
and general look and feel, behaviour etc. Is it ok to break that by using
lots of javascript to list and edit redirects? Is it ok to write to a page
other than the one the user is looking at? Is it ok to pop open a new window
to facilitate the user editing multiple pages at once? Is it ok to generate
code for a disambiguation page and ask the user to review it?
All of these things would be novel.
Steve