Wikipedia talk:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/Early/cleanup/double redirects/20051009

message: If an article redirects to itself, let Triddle or I know and we can delete the article. There is absolutely no reason to keep articles that redirect to themselves. I did see one tonight that someone claimed was redirected to itself but one was Timeline of Golf History 1945-1999 and the other was (1945-1999). Not the same. :) So you have to be careful on that. --Woohookitty 08:43, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Redirects to itself

message: At the danger of making myself very impopular, have you considered that some double redirects might actually be useful? For instance all misspellings of a word should redirect to the correct spelling, even if that word itself redirects somewhere else. Plurals should likewise always redirect to their singular form, even if that singular form is itself a redirect. This is their correct target and I don't think it makes sense to alter them according to where their target redirects whenever that changes. Otherwise redirects aren't cheap any more.  --MarSch 11:09, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Useful double redirects 

message: Someone edited KODAK DX6440 ZOOM DIGITAL CAMERA, removed a template that was on the same line as the redirect, and left an edit comment pointing to this project.  The template in question was , marking it as a redirect from automatically generated links in image descriptions created from EXIF information in the image file.  
Perhaps the script that generated these pages assumed that nothing would be on the same line but the redirect itself?  Anyway, be careful about doing things like that. —Morven 16:43, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Its a human that did it - the script only builds a list of double redirects, the human editors fix them, completely by hand. I've created no tool to assist in that. I'm not clear on exactly what behavior should change. It doesn't seem to me that anything needs to be changed in software but instead that some better instructions should be put up on the project page. Can you confirm? Do the instructions just need to say that one should only update the double redirect, leave all the other information in the redirect page alone? Triddle 16:52, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The "double redirects" caused by the template were listed at Special:DoubleRedirects, not here.  Specifically, it's listed as KODAK DX6440 ZOOM DIGITAL CAMERA redirects to EXIF which redirects to Exchangeable image file format.  The only way to de-list it is to remove the template.  I wasn't sure why people would need an explanation as to why certain redirects existed (especially since being a redirect, they won't see the template), so I just removed the template.  Is there a way for the system to not mark them as double redirects?  --Kbdank71 17:59, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redirects with other text on the line 

message: Aren't there bots which do this, or assist humans when doing this?  If there are, shouldn't that be mentioned on the page? -R. S. Shaw 21:12, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Robots 

message: Becareful when moving the redirect, don't just copy the name of the link, check it first.  Some larger articles have redirects that goto subsections.  If you just move the redirect to the artle, it looses it's subsection pointer.--Rayc 01:31, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I wish it did work, but it doesn't.  Still, I am heeding your advice to retain the subsection in the links I "disdoubleredirect" (I just made up that word) because as people discover articles that link to redirects, they should "disredirect" them, linking them instead directly to the article.  When they do that, the subsection pointer does work, so that's why they should be retained intact, if at all possible.--GraemeMcRaetalk 01:28, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Subsections