Redirected user pages considered harmful
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Some people have set their user pages on some wiki, particularly here on Meta-Wiki, to redirect to their user pages on another wiki, such as their home language Wikipedia.
While on the surface this is a pretty neat thing, it's somewhat problematic, at least with the current (primitive) implementation of inter-wiki redirects:
- It obscures the links to the user contributions and user's talk page on the present wiki.
- If you change your mind, there's not a clean way to edit the redirect to put text back into it.
- You can go to a page that links to it, use "related changed" to bring up its history or a diff, and then click "edit" there.
- You can construct a URL to get at it in no-redirect mode: http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User:My_name_here&redirect=no
- It surprises people by taking them to a different wiki.
Anyway, just thoughts. Improvements can be made to the system in future...
- We just need a "redirected from" option in the URL. Something like:
- I'll put it on my to do list. -- Tim Starling 16:08, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)