Talk:Amy pond

Prop Delete

Just noticed the delete tag has been removed from this page, as well as Rose tyler. For full disclosure I have also found Donna noble and Wilfred mott which suffer from the same problem. Search is case insensitive, so this is not really a misspelling, and on the new desktop skin redirects show up as their own entry (on the mobile skin they are 'folded' into the destination page like on Fandom), so when you type in "amy pond" into the search bar you get both "Amy Pond" and "Amy pond", which I think is actually bad for searchability - it duplicates a page and in some cases pushes another page out of the top 10 dropdown list.

So I really don't see any reason why these pages should exist, and "misspellings" based on capitalisation should not get their own redirects. On this front I see that both No-Thing and No-thing have been made very recently, which suffer from the same problem. Guyus24 ☎ 22:45, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Nah. Redirects are good. I recall having been told by an admin that the more redirects, the better. We already have loads of redirects to other articles which are constructed the same way. Danniesen ☎ 22:53, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not arguing to get rid of redirects entirely, just this small subset which have no tangible benefits and definite negatives. Redirects for searchability are good, but, as I already explained, these have no effect on that front.

On the "No-Thing" and "No-thing" matter, one of those redirects should exist (for searchability), but having both is pointless, because it's just clogging the search results. Guyus24 ☎ 09:22, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

It is a weird, temporary post-fork aberration of our search system that redirects are showing up as their own results. This is not intended performance, and we cannot restructure our entire philosophy around redirects to accommodate them. There is a means to hide redirects from search results, so perhaps we could compile a list of capitalisation-based redirects? At the very least, if we go forward with deleting, we should establish a list so that they can all be recreated once search is fixed. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 15:16, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I still don't know why you'd want these pages to exist, and why you would want to recreate them after deleting? When these redirects are hidden then it becomes a case of no positives and no negatives, which I still don't think is enough to justify their existence. In fact, if the new search system is CirrusSearch/ElasticSearch, then the index for a site this size will be huge and I think it would be in the wiki's best interest to cut down on the size of it by removing these extraneous entries. Not to mention that that extension has the capability to handle typos within a threshold, further reducing the need for misspelled redirects.Guyus24 ☎ 22:41, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I very much disagree that "redirects are a good thing", they are not. They create all sorts of detritus in a wiki.

Our Tardis:Redirect does not say anything like "the more redirects the better". In fact it says:

Redirects should never be created solely for the purpose of allowing or forgiving bad spelling.

Thinking along those lines would mean well meaning users would be creating iterations / redirects for every individual and real world person. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:06, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I think that's a user-unfriendly view, certainly for high-traffic page. "Forgiving" bad spelling is an oddly judgemental way to frame things; we're not here to punish or forgive readers for bad spelling, we're here to help them find the pages they're looking for. More redirects aren't always better, but common misspellings that the not-wes might plausibly type into the search page should in my opinion clearly be retained as redirects. This had become common practice for a bit pre-fork, so I think this is arguably one of these new-T:BOUND situations where Current Practice trumps out-of-date written policy… But I'll grant that the practice may never have become prominent enough to warrant that status, and the fork's reduced search capabilities changes the territory in any case, so we should probably just make a Forum thread of it and make up our minds explicitly. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 14:08, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

The point still stands that search is case insensitive on both skins. And since we don't want users actually editing with this redirect (which should be the line we draw here, in my opinion), the only tangible benefit is for readers to write the name in lower case directly in the URL bar.

We could do a list of page names we don't want to appear in search and provide that to our team behind the curtain, of course, as mentioned. If that's the solution we go for, I'd really like to include all case variation, so items don't show up twice for the same search term.

Seeing both "Not Things" and "Not things" in search gives the false impression that these are two different topics, according to our own conventions.
×   SOTO contribs ×°/↯/•]   💬•| {/-//:   15:46, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Actually, T:BOUND isn't the whole story — Forum:Relaxing T:HONOUR did rule that…

…we should generally have a number of redirects for a given character, even technically ‘incorrect’ ones. And we should retain them even if they’re not linked to from anywhere in a Special:WhatLinksHere sense. Such ‘orphaned’ redirect are still useful for search functions. As such, Father Kreiner should certainly exist, and likewise Cousin Justine or even something even less supported by the sources, like War Queen Romana.Forum:Relaxing T:HONOUR

Of course, that wasn't about misspellings, let alone incorrect capitalisation. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:35, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I disagree that it's a user unfriendly perspective.

People should be able to get to the page they're looking for as easily as possible, but if two versions of the same article, one a redirect and one the genuine article come up in search suggestions, then we want to remove as many barriers there are for users to be clicking the actual article.

Common mis-spellings perhaps could be retained, but doing redirects in lower case, when the search field will return the actual article even without a redirect doesn't help push people to the right article. If I write "peter davison" lower case I still get "Peter Davison" autosuggested. Having "Amy pond" as a redirect just adds more noise to the search suggestions. --Tangerineduel / talk 06:09, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

But yet again, redirects are not supposed to show up seperately from the real title. This wasn’t a problem on the Fandom Wiki, and frankly it’s a bit of a waste of time to have an issue with a temporary problem that will eventually be fixed. Danniesen ☎ 09:18, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

"How temporary" is a relevant question here. As is Guyus' point about minor misspellings. I think the existence of these redirects is currently hostile to the end user, but the lack of them on Fandom could have been the other way. It's context dependent. For the time being they should probably go. At the very least if the issue isn't resolvable before May 11. Najawin ☎ 09:40, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Indeed, currently these redirects don't add functionality to the wiki, they get in the way.

Redirect pages can always be re-created if they're needed, but creating new pages now with the future idea that they might be useful isn't helpful to the use or engagement with the wiki, it's doing the opposite and creating an additional step for users. --Tangerineduel / talk 14:26, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Okay, but look at it this way… 1. you’re still ending up on the page you want to, whether you click the redirect or not (you do not end up on the redirect-page itself), 2. are we really going to create extra work in the long run whenever this issue does get fixed, forcing editors to painstakingly track down and recreate the redirects that got deleted, because we don’t want to have an issue that is only gonna be a temporary one? Danniesen ☎ 14:45, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Again, "how temporary" is relevant here. If, for instance, we upgrade search before the new season (unlikely, I think), I think there's no clear reason to change. If it's longer, well, we have to weigh end user experience vs effort. Let's say the issue is fixed in five years. That's "temporary", but a long time off. We can't let the great be the enemy of the good. (Great name for an FP story.) And I don't want to rush our sysadmin/server team here. I just think we need to be realistic about the changing scenarios of being on a different server with constantly evolving capabilities. It means we need to be a little flexible. Najawin ☎ 02:05, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

It's hardly "painstaking", it would not be too difficult to have page to record the deletions of these redirects, should the currently limitations be overcome. And as an admin that has done a lot of "painstaking" tedious tasks in the past, this is a very simple concern compared to some of the other maintenance tasks. The pages needn't even need re-creating, they can be undeleted should the need arise. That it's "painstaking" shouldn't be an argument against a better user experience in the interim.

We need to work with what we have at the moment to make the user experience the best at the moment, not what might be a temporary issues.

As an aside, deletions are also logged and viewable; Special:Log/delete. --Tangerineduel / talk 05:46, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that's all reasonable. I support deleting this and other capitalisation-based ones if we keep a log of them for ease of recreation later. (I do think we should retain redirects for misspellings that are common and substantial even if not officially-supported, though. Timelord for Time Lord probably has some official usage — I believe User:JDPManjoume has some data on this — but things like that.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 15:30, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Again, why would you want to recreate these though? They're pointless, even in this hypothetical new system they don't solve any search problems. Guyus24 ☎ 23:04, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

It is possible for someone to type a name into the URL, I know I have before. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 23:11, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Furthermore, many Discord servers use a bot that can provide a link to the Wiki if a phrase is formatted. People often don't fully capitalise words there, so these redirects are helpful.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

00:34, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

(I'd been thinking that, I just wasn't sure how to articulate it) Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 00:39, 26 March 2024 (UTC)