On 2010-07-26 23:51:23 -0500, Rajko M. wrote:
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:51:23 -0500 From: "Rajko M." <rmatov101@charter.net> Subject: Re: [opensuse-wiki] Good/cool links never change To: opensuse-wiki@opensuse.org
On Monday 26 July 2010 13:08:34 Juergen Weigert wrote:
Correct. If possible, please add comments to the links in the redirects page, so that we know why they are there, and can phase them out over time. E.g. 'Extern entity "http://foo.bar.baz" references this URL'
I used Talk pages of redirects to put [[Category:Redirects to delete]] there, but as I just discovered category can be included in the redirect page itself without problems.
Do we have to reference who is pointing to old link? It would be ideal to do that, but as you can see from small sample on: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Missing_pages that can be quite long list for each redirect, and still miss all our docs. BTW, just tested 'link:"<url>"' and it doesn't work well, just as simple "<url>" doesn't, so numbers of hits are not really reliable.
When to delete? I would leave that decision to some scheduled review process, where links will be reviewed periodically and removed if possible. Many will be obsolete after some time and then they can be removed without pain. Other will never change.
you make things really complicated. no deleting redirects is not an option. you cant changed printed material ever. also you cant change all blog posts and stuff. or internal wikis of companies e.g. using the OBS. so the link has to stay forever. But where is the problem with redirect pages? people visit the old link. get redirected to the new url and get a nice note "redirected from <oldname>". user is happy as they find their information. If you really want we can change the message text to something like. "Redirected from <oldname>. If you got send to the old url from an external page please update the link to the new name"
In general: The transition doesn't mean that we have to change and break all stuff at once, but to set direction. Web and search engines will find new articles, but they need time and that can be few years.
Problem with sites as our wiki is that they use article title as URL, so it is not easy to change title without breaking all links, ditto automatic creation of redirects, but also request to writers to watch how to name their creations, to prevent need for renaming.
The problem with redirects is that they blur separation on namespaces by topics and attempt to keep distro presentation clean from problem solutions. Searching for ATI, with redirect you get problem solution article in SDB. Not really wanted for first time visitors. Solution can be to create ATI article instead of redirect that will present ATI at opensuse and include links to SDB.
the search can be limited to certain namespaces by default. That is a second complain about the wiki, which i hear regularly "the broken links wouldnt be too bad if the search would work atleast." which might be related to the fact that it only searches portal pages by default. including atleast the opensuse namespace in the default namespaces for search, would make that complain go away. but i left it out because i dont want to have 2 discussions at the same time.
On the other hand broken links from other sites (web and our infrastructure) can make a lot more damage to openSUSE image then not so clean separation of content. Check Distrowatch and Alexa, and give your interpretation of trends.
that is exactly my point. so can we please use the tools of the wiki to make users happy again? (and thats why we are here, arent we? darix -- openSUSE - SUSE Linux is my linux openSUSE is good for you www.opensuse.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org