I think your point is of limited relevance, Gerard.
* If somebody searches on Wikidata or Reasonator, they will be taken to
the Wikidata item we have -- so this proposal will make no difference.
* If somebody searches on xx-Wikipedia, and if there is already a
redirect, they will be taken to the redirected item, just as they are at
the moment -- so this proposal will make no difference.
* If somebody is reading an article on yy-Wikipedia, and wonders how the
material is covered on xx-Wikipedia, they will now be able to see that
there is not a directly equivalent item, but it is handled by a
redirect. That is information we currently do not show them, that may
in many cases be useful -- eg it prompts them to look to see whether
xx-Wikipedia's existing coverage is adequate, or whether xx-Wikipedia
would benefit from a new article being published.
It's worth noting, if they're looking at yy-Wikipedia, they will still
be able to see a link to Wikidata (which could/should be made more
prominent, by moving it to the "in other projects" part of the sidebar),
and from the Wikidata item they can navigate to Reasonator, just as they
do at the moment.
* The only real difference is for people searching in xx-Wikipedia, if
that get taken to new redirects that didn't previously exist, but that
permitting this has encouraged people to create. Your complaint seems
to be that they aren't offered a Wikidata/Reasonator link instead.
But then, they're not offered a Wikidata/Reasonator link at the moment
-- so really nothing is being loss. Instead, I take what you're saying
as a feature request: if somebody is searching on xx-Wikipedia, and
that search would have hits on Reasonator that are different from
wherever a redirect would point to, then present those options as well.
But either way, that is a future feature request, because it's not an
option that people get presented with at the moment.
Finally, you write that the thinking is "very much Wikipedia oriented".
And to an extent that is true, because this *is* about the sidelinks
people see when they are browsing Wikipedia, and really it affects
Wikidata hardly at all -- very little either way.
But there would be one significant advantage for Wikidata, I think:
If people could accurately link to redirects, I think we would have
better hygiene here about what items are instances or subclasses of --
eg whether an item was for a profession/professional -- because there
would no longer be such a motivation to something that many people do
really quite often now -- namely to lump together articles of different
kinds from different Wikipedias, purely for the sake of preserving
sitelinks, rather than to much more clearly define an item and its true
sublinks to strictly reflect what it is an instance of. That is a
current problem that I think facilitating sitelinks to redirects would I
hope help ease.
All best,
James.
On 10/12/2014 10:11, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi,
Maybe. At the same time other people are equally opposed to what you favour
so much. Your approach is one that is very much Wikipedia oriented. It is
not something that makes sense with a more Wikidata oriented approach.
The point is that quite often Wikidata is more informative than what
Wikipedia has to say in these redirects. It is also much better to link to
Reasonator to inform you about missing information than referring to
disambiguation pages or use redirects.
Really your approach does not consider the relevance the information
Wikidata and Reasonator holds.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 10 December 2014 at 10:06, James Heald <j.he...@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
The trouble is that a particular individual may have many memberships and
affiliations -- some perhaps to small units like bands; but some to larger
groups like clubs, or artistic movements.
It's better to let humans decide where is the best place in a particular
language to redirect people looking for information about a particular
person or thing.
And that then also covers hatmakers/hatmaking, or Bonnie and Clyde, and
every other example which is not just about a member of bands.
This discussion has been going on for two years now, and every time it has
come up (which has been many times -- at least a dozen now?), there have
been an overwhelming number of people supporting allowing and marking
site-links to redirects.
It's now time to move forward.
In particular, what are the parts of the code that assume sitelinks cannot
be to redirects (or that update sitelinks if pages are turned into
redirects) ? How do these need to be adjusted, if we move to a model of
allowing sitelinks to redirects, but only if a user has explicitly
confirmed that that is what they want.
There is a longstanding open feature request for this,
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T54564
and that is perhaps the place to move to a discussion of which parts of
the code would need to be reviewed, if sitelinks to redirects are to become
mainstream.
-- James.
_______________________________________________
Wikidata-l mailing list
Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
