On Saturday 23 July 2005 21:49, Brion Vibber wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
I had an interesting conversation with Brion. We
do not agree on
everything. One of the things we do not agree on are redirects.
In my opinion, Wiktionary should not have redirects. A word is either
spelled correctly and it will have its lemma or it is not and there will
not be a lemma with the incorrect spelling.
In Brions opinion there are links to lemmas and as we need to ensure
that these links remain ok, we need redirects to make this possible.
The gap between my thinking and Gerard's thinking appears to be that
Gerard considers redirects to be canonincal content; thus having a
"wrong spelling" in a URL somehow implies that this is a "correct"
spelling, which is therefore wrong and should be removed.
[...]
More generally, it's completely irresponsible for
a web-based resource
to rearrange content pages without providing a redirect from the old
URL. This is a basic principle which applies just as much to Wiktionary
as to Wikipedia, just as much to Hewlett Packard's driver web pages as
to Slashdot postings, just as much to a database of autogenerated
earthquake reports or a collection of press releases as to an online
academic journal.
I, in fact, agree with both of you :) I agree that a web-based resource should
have its URLs as permanent as possible, but I also think that in the UW it
should be possible to specify in the database anything which was in
traditional wiktionaries done with redirects.
A simple way to solve this could be to make redirects function differently
than they usually do on MediaWiki: instead of silently displaying content of
another page under the same URL, they could simply display "Contents of this
page has moved to [[that page]]." Thatway, URLs would still exist and be
useful, while there would be absolutely no danger of mistaking redirects for
canonical content.