[WikiEN-l] Re: anglicization

Thu Nov 21 18:00:32 UTC 2002

On Thursday 21 November 2002 12:41 am, Magnus Manske wrote:
> With redirects, we can catch all common spellings. The idea is that when
> someone who doesn't know the "correct" spelling (if there is such a
> thing) links to a topic, (s)he will use, with some likelyhood, the most
> common spelling. On the English wikipedia, that's the most common one
> *in English*. So, we'd want to put the article under that spelling, as
> to avoid redirects as much as possible when reading the 'pedia.

Thank you Magnus, that is the main point I've been trying to get across for 
some time now. It is also one of the main reasons why my preemptive city 
naming convention was never adopted - It is simply stupid and not at all 
useful for have an article about the Paris in France at [[Paris, France]] 
when the great majority of links to it are through the redirect [[Paris]]. 

Redirects are also ugly and uninformative in the search results. Their byte 
counts show up as tiny and no text is displayed below them. This isn't 
useful. Articles should be where they are most likely to be searched for. 
External search engines like Google will also rank an article lower at a 
non-English title linked via an English redirect for searches for the English 
term because our article will not have the H1 title in the searched for 
English term (which is going to be the most common thing that English 
speakers will be searching for).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)