Gentlemen, I am having a problem in that I am ending up reading the
same articles over and over, only to get halfway through them before
realizing "didn't I read something like this last month?"
How could that be? My browser (actually WWWOFFLE) keeps track of what
links I've already clicked on. They will be in an "already clicked"
color so I don't end up clicking again.
Ah, it is all because MediaWiki insists on calling the same article
different names. Consider these three cases:
1) [[ADSL]]
2) [[Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line]]
3) [[Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line|ADSL]]
which produce
1) <a href="/wiki/ADSL" class="mw-redirect"
title="ADSL">ADSL</a>
2) <a href="/wiki/Asymmetric_Digital_Subscriber_Line" title="Asymmetric
Digital Subscriber Line">Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line</a>
3) <a href="/wiki/Asymmetric_Digital_Subscriber_Line" title="Asymmetric
Digital Subscriber Line">ADSL</a>
I hereby propose input 1 now make output 3 instead of output 1.
'But what about the "(Redirected from ADSL)" message?' you ask.
Is that really all the big difference is? Seems so. Well, losing it
would be a small price to pay vs. all the worldwide cache space and
network traffic caused by the same article with many names needing a
separate copy. Implementing this might even delay new hardware
purchase needs a year.
Note that no, we are not asking the user to change their writing
habits. They can still go ahead and use their favorite redirect names,
the more the merrier. All we are doing is canonicalizing the HTTP
link. As we see MediaWiki is quite aware (class="mw-redirect") that it
is a redirect, we bridge the gap and remove the runaround by going
further and linking directly.