[Moving responses to what seems to be a new thread - though it may
just be a new subject line, GMail's broken at telling the difference.]
On 27/11/05, Jamie Bliss <astronouth7303(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Does that line provide the inexperianced/ignorant user
with any
information of value? (ignorant == "unaware of how MW works in this regard")
A casual reader will not care if they are redirected between pages. An
inexperianced editor _may_ wonder why they link to [[Foo]] and end up at
[[Bar]]; some help entries can help on this if they don't already exist.
Actually, I would disagree with this rather strongly - a casual reader
(or newbie editor, which we encourage to be the same thing) will
generally be *very* surprised if they end up at a different page from
the one they expected, precisely because they *don't* know what a
redirect is. They may well not care that they're redirected between
pages, but if they're not told that that's the case, *they will be
confused*.
The chances of them finding a help page explaining this also seem
rather slim - what would they search for? "Help:Pages which aren't
called what you expect"?
IMHO, the information is rarely of value. Situations
in which it is
almost always involves editing and maintenance. I consider it unlikely
of an anonymous and/or inexperianced editor wondering about this. (The
true test is the various support channels.)
Well, you've hit the nail on the head there - the reason I am so
confident in how new users will react is that I've seen their
questions on the en.Wikipedia Help desk, things like "Whenever I try
and look at page X, I end up at page Y instead! What am I doing
wrong!?"
Indeed, this suggests that even our current label isn't doing its job
well enough; for one thing - IMHO - Monobook makes it far too small
and faint, as though we're ashamed of it and want to hide it among the
"mechanics" of the UI.
On 26/11/05, Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote:
I'm not convinced that you need to know which one
you actually came
through, especially if you have a list of all of them.
Well, I think it's important firstly to let users know that they
*have* been redirected. Otherwise the wiki appears to be doing "magic"
with links and page names, rather than being really straight-forward
and easy to understand (even a piped link has the exact name of the
target page written into it).
And secondly, the combination of piped links and redirects may mean
you don't know *exactly* what page you *should* have ended up at, and
it might not jump out of the list at you. So on a page with lots of
redirects, you'd have to:
1) go "back" a page and find the link you clicked, hovering over it to
discover the actual target in the tooltip
2) go "forward" (or click it again)
3) click "what links here" (or "edit this page", though I don't
see
why it would belong there) and possibly an extra button to get the
"what redirects here" display
4) find the link back to the title discovered at step 1 to get at the
redirect to edit/view comments in history/etc...
Or, of course, you could manually create a "redirect=no" URL after
step 1, but that's hardly a user friendly interface. Maybe I'm making
a meal of this, but it seems to me that's not all that unlikely a
situation.
If you follow a link in an article and are redirected
to a place you
didn't expect to be redirected to, then looking at a list of "articles
that redirect here" is doubly useful because you can fix other
inappropriate redirects as well, not just the one you stumbled upon.
This is a good argument for power users, who understand how redirects
work, and may even spot a redirect without any "redirected from"
message - though I think even I would be slightly confused if the
redirect was instant and invisible. But I'm not sure these are the
only users who benefit from the current message, as explained above.
The whatlinkshere page could do with some improvement, though, and
perhaps being able to separate the redirects from the "normal" links
would be a useful feature to add to it.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]