Talk: Redirects

Important: What is a proper convention on Soft Redirects?

I notice Template:Redirect is only used for Nintendo Wiki, and even then only for Nintendo 64DD and people involved in game dev (I think).

At present I also notice a lot of normal redirects to the NIWA wikis, e.g. to ssbwiki Shield#Automatic; Should all these links to external wikis be turned into soft redirects? Or which ones?

In addition, I am curious as to some of the reasons for soft redirects at all? It's is useful to know when one is leaving Zelda Wiki, but then again, are there any soft redirects for external links?

Lastly, I notice that soft redirects under The Groosenator were removed (presumably because they are not linked to from the (main) namespace), such the first three that occurred on 3rd Nov - Of course, these three may be rightly so since they are only used there and not in the (main) namespace, but unless we make more soft redirects to the relevant wikis they can't be replaced. (Is the reason "Unnecessary redirect" the lack of use as a link in the (main) namespace, to external pages?)

Well, I guess the most important thing is to sort out: When should we be using soft redirects and when shouldn't we, since "These are used instead of normal redirects when the destination is a special page or a page on another wiki, namely that of a NIWA member" doesn't seem to be followed, is it?

--KokoroSenshi 06:16, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

We've never elaborated a proper policy for soft redirects, like for many things.

Soft redirects to Nintendo content unrelated to Zelda (like the Birdo one that linked to Super Mario Wiki) were unnecessary. Killing them was probably a good move.

Ideally, we should code something for external links – including interwiki links – that, when clicked, automatically notifies the user that they are leaving the wiki, and tells them what site they're going to. I guess this would be done with JavaScript or with PHP as a wiki extension. Soft redirects could be used as a low-tech alternative to that... However, as important as this kind of functionality is for user-friendliness, making soft redirects for every NIWA link on the wiki would be excessive and too difficult to maintain.

The other potential use for soft redirects is for things the wiki really should have articles on, but doesn't because another NIWA wiki covers it just fine. Most of the soft redirects that remain (e.g. Satoru Iwata and N64DD like you mentioned) seem to serve this purpose.

I can see how this is better than simply using direct external links on every article where, say, Satoru Iwata (may he rest in peace) is mentioned. For one, if someone searches for him on the wiki, they'll get a redirect instead of an empty search. The other thing is, it's more future-proof. If we decide Super Mario Wiki has a better article on Iwata-san than Nintendo Wiki, it's easier to change one soft redirect than several interwiki links.

An alternative to this approach is to make brief articles that redirect to partner wikis. We're already doing this with Template:Exitstub-nintendo. Although it requires more effort to make stub articles, it may be more helpful than soft redirects (and appear less half-assed). In that case we could just say no to soft redirects entirely.

Short answer: The status quo is probably fine, but if we were to set down a guideline, which we should, I would say cut out the soft redirects and just link directly, or make stub articles with Template:Exitstub-nintendo for Nintendo articles directly related to Zelda. Also, setting up automatic notification for external links should be a development priority (which, sadly, doesn't mean much since we're lacking front-end devs). — Hylian King ^[*] 08:13, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Ok, well I experimented a bit with javascript on the wiki (didn't even realize we can do this stuff) and did up a rough confirmation box on my common.js here; It pops up when one navigates to a soft redirect page and redirects when the ok button is clicked (after 10 seconds, for now). You did mention that having some sort of page avoids an empty search, so I suppose we will still be using normal internal links, instead of having links on a page that activate a js to redirect. (with jQuery we could customize the notification/confirmation box nicely I believe) Of course I don't know what better capabilities a wiki has to implement such things.

--KokoroSenshi 06:33, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Interesting, but I don't know if we really need that for soft redirect pages, especially if we plan on eliminating them. I think that kind of notice would be more useful for external links in actual articles (perhaps that's what you mean by "having links that activate JS"). Also, I think the "timer" would have to be triggered alongside the prompt – it seems redundant to click "OK" on a prompt and then have to wait 10 seconds. Something like this is what I had in mind.

I plan on installing the Gadget extension at some point, so we can consider adding a Gadget for any finished script you come up with.

Nice to know we have someone who knows a bit of JS. :) — Hylian King ^[*] 06:19, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Would we still be able to use the search bar to find these external wiki pages, or do we even need to? We could keep the redirect pages to redirect to the external wikis, which would be easy to manage, unless our js just detects the external links to wikis from the [www.somewiki.com blah] stuff. Also, I haven't found confirmation as to whether non-registered users can use these gadgets?

Also, haha that delay is very pointless indeed! I just cobbled that together kinda randomly.

I wonder how feasible it is to make a generic prompt that can be customizable through a page on the wiki in wikitext while avoiding security vulnerabilities (I don't know much about kinds of js vulnerabilities at all).

By the way, interestingly the Tracking Protection for Firefox private browsing seems to disable the prompt boxes at the link you mentioned, going straight to the destination.

--KokoroSenshi 11:52, 7 January 2016 (UTC)