Wikipedia talk:Defective redirects

what's up with this list? instead of going to the trouble of listing something as easy to fix as mis-directed redirects, why not just fix them? -- Anon

Because there are hundreds of them, so it is a big job. (If the job is really that easy, you are free to do it yourself Mr Anon.)

It's also a job that really needs doing by people rather than an automated script, to double check that the redirect to the new page is logical and as intended. Enchanter

Note that the list only includes 'defective redirects' that are linked from elsewhere in Wikipedia, i.e. it ignores 'orphan defective redirects', of which there are thousands. These are not linked within Wikipedia, and if they are linked from outside they will not link directly to an article, so don't look particularly good. We could consider deleting all of these - I think that could be done quickly and easily by someone with developer access. Enchanter

How did you generate this list? Are there more non-orphan defective redirects or have we fixed all of them now? --mav

I generated this list with a couple of queries to the database (one to get redirects-to-redirects, one to get orphans) and a bit of manipulation to find the non-orphan redirects-to-redirects. It will have picked up all of them when the query was run, so that's all for now!

I plan on redoing the same thing every two or three months or so - that way it should be quite a small manageable job each time.

Between us all we managed to fix the 450 or so pages in less than 2 days. I never thought it would be so quick - it shows the power of Wikipedia cooperation!

In case anyone still has time on their hands, there is a much bigger job waiting - fixing all the links to disambiguation pages at Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links. In all, there are about 7000 links like that that need to be fixed (not all on the page), so that should keep us busy for some time yet...

Enchanter

So how did you make those queries? Is it somewhere explained how to make this kind of queries? When I try to make a query, I just see "SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ..." and have no idea what to make of that. Also, there are some categories of defective redirects that are not caught here, in particular redirects to non-existing pages. Could you find those?

Of course that leaves still quite some category of defective redirects that cannot be found - pages that redirect to another page than the most appropriate one, pages that redirect to disambiguation pages... But then, similar problems exist with non-redirect pages too. I have every now and again met two pages that discussed the same or almost the same subject. That's also very hard to find out. Andre Engels