Wikipedia talk:Multiple Redirects

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[edit] Why Wikipedia:Multiple Redirects?

from User talk:Gangleri#Wikipedia:Multiple Redirects:

I don't think it is necessary to keep track of multiple redirects. The obvious way to deal with them is to edit all redirects to point to the real article, e.g. if A redirects to B & B redirects to C, you just have to edit A to redirect to C directly. I don't think there is any possibility of a better thing to do, at least with multiple redirects, per se. Under which title the article must finally be located is a different issue that could be settled in the talk pages/IRC/whatever but while that's being debated, doing the above is the right thing AFAICT. BTW just in case you agree with me, that page probably must be deleted. -- Paddu 18:42, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Dear Paddu, Thank you for your answer. Regarding both Wikipedia:Multiple Redirects and Wikipedia:Invalid article names (related to "invalid link names") I want to say, that I experienced those before. I spend more then six hours on different Wikipedias a day and learned that is impossible and a bad idea that first visitors tray to fix the page, because they may not be familiar with the topic: arabic names, medieval names and very special other thinks.

That is just for people visiting pages they have no clue about, in which case they wouldn't try to edit apart from for vandalising. People visiting a page about something they know ought to feel compelled to contribute to it. That's how a wiki builds up.

If you would do it yourself and want to do it with care you can spend many hours such topics. I myself do not want to be invoved to that level.

I initially didn't understand what this was about. Now that I understand, what I was saying is that bug reports ought to give whatever information a developer requires to reproduce a problem. If you don't want to be involved enough to let others know how to reproduce the problem, how could you expect them to solve it? If on the other hand the bug was easily reproduced and still someone marked it as WORKSFORME that could mean that the problem somehow got fixed. If that's not true, reopen the bug and state your case more clearly. If you're not able to, gather others who could, e.g. if you talk about the bug in page X in Talk:X, and say that the bug was inappropriately marked RESOLVED, someone else (probably more experienced) would come along and take appropriate action. Or failing that, you could use the discussion page of the corresponding wiki, etc. (This paragraph and the previous doesn't belong here, should probably be moved to your talk page)

Please think also about the abundency of informations related to Wikipedias own issues, about "what to do", "how to do", "where to report" and so on. I was realy happy at the beginning to find Wikipedia:Duplicate articles where I can simple drop a note and (hopefully) some other users more skilled with the subject will fix it.

There migth be a good idea, that a coach / sme coches should contact the initiators / contributors of these articles regarding the problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by coaches. There are people watching what newbies do (by checking Special:Recent changes), and would help them learn. Or did you mean something like WP:NOOB where the newbie him/herself could ask for help?

I think that on some of the pages starting with Wikipedia: and handling special technical issues some links to experienced users should be included in order to have somebody to talk with. I have seen many such pages not beeing in categories and it was dificult for myself to find those topics. I have about 450 pages in the (English) watchlist. I am not shure that if I post a message at such a special talk page somebody will get notice of it. When this will happen and what action I can expect.

I removed my statement that the characters used in Norse saga are not Unicode characters. They are. The question is if they are ISO 8859-1 and if Wikipedia handles them correctly. So first is having somebody to verify this without doubth and also being able to provide some turnarounds / hints / helps or knowing somebody who has more expertise on this.

In the case of the REDIRECTS the main article should be at the most suitable from all the possible candidats. How a beginner / visitor shoud decide on this? This would be (realy) "wiki" (hawaiian for "quick") but not enciclopedic. Regards Gangleri 22:54, 2004 Nov 10 (UTC)

No!!! Sometimes, such things cannot be decided even by experienced persons single-handedly. Usually that requires a lot of discussions in talk pages. But until such matters are resolved, there is simply no use of having redirects to redirects. Actually the existence of such pages points to the carelessness/laziness of the person who moved a page or created a redirect. Before doing such things, one ought to ensure there isn't a redirect to the page where a new redirect is being created. Though the beginner can't decide where the final page must be, he/she could fix the multiple redirect if he/she knows how to. Actually, I wouldn't call you a beginner, after seeing how much wiki code you've in your user page, in your signature and in your bug reports and pages referenced in them. You could've fixed the Inuktitut redirect yourself.

You are probably right that fixing a multiple redirect imediately is helpfull. The other part (verifying what would be the best artictle name ...) is important too. This is the moste time consuming and it is realy hard to get the original people involved. I would not call myself a beginner eigther. I just think what could go wrong and what doubts beginners could have.

P.S. The most important issue: How to integrate this in the normal Wikipedia maintenance concept? What other topics should be included there in order to find them easy without long "investigations". Regards Gangleri 23:04, 2004 Nov 10 (UTC)

I'm not sure what are all the topics. There's an enormous list of pages in the Wikipedia namespace. BTW you must add to the list whatever pages you created if you haven't done so already. Also I feel part of this conversation is more relevant to Wikipedia:Invalid article names than here and should be moved/copied/linked from there. -- Paddu 12:25, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

With intergrating in this particulare case I was thinking about:

a) Being able to find the place to address "problematical issues" starting from a central (focused) place. You probably know that categories should not be redirected at the moment. I found one at is: and it is deleted now. The first issue I found some weeks ago was about Wikipedia:Duplicate articles at eo: and I made InterWiki links at the languages I knew about.

b) I did not read much about the Wikipedia maintenance concept until now. I have seen bots changing typo's (BTW: there is an interesting one, see Wikipedia talk:Categorization#Categorisation and Categorization), generating lists and reports and all gets more and more linked together. To come back to the issue from bug 660: I wondered how these links looked as valid links and why they have benn broken (at that time). I questioned myself if (due to implementation of new versions) some "articles with invalid names" could be in the namespace. Until now I do not know, if somebody verifies this or not. I first experienced characterset issues traying to make Timişoara bugzilla:579. Later I questioned myself if this would have been possible in earlier versions and how often this would happened.

Thank you for your time and patience. Feel free to move the whole talk or parts of it whereever you think it would be more appropriate. Regards [[User:Gangleri|Gangleri | T | Th]] 23:21, 2004 Nov 11 (UTC)

P.S. There is an e-mail from Brion "[Wikitech-l] Unicode normalization spot-checks" which seems to relate to this subject. 01:00, 2004 Nov 12 (UTC)

[edit] Is this considered a technical issue, or a design choice?

Is the lack of following double-redirects something that's going to be fixed at some point? Or is it a well-considered design choice, after lengthy discussion? I find that there are a lot of cases when double redirects should exist. For example, hydrogen bomb currently redirects to nuclear weapon. The plural form, hydrogen bombs, should link to the singular, hydrogen bomb, but it's forced to link to nuclear weapon instead. In cases where the single-redirect may be a valid article topic, the double-redirect will often want to redirect to it. -- Creidieki 13:02, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)