Re: Community Teams

[Ekaterina Gerasimova <kittykat3756 gmail com>]

On 4 December 2013 14:08, William Jon McCann
<william jon mccann gmail com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 6:12 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova
> <kittykat3756 gmail com> wrote:
> > Jon, if you do end up moving any of the pages, please make sure to add
> > redirects. A number of other wiki pages have been moved recently and
> > because redirects were not added, this has left a lot of broken links
> > all over the internet.
>
> Which links are broken all over the internet?

The ones that I have come across most often, which I fixed in the
appropriate places, were from Wikipedia articles to our application
"websites" and from references.

There are also links to our wiki from user created resources such as
guides and blogposts, which we cannot fix, as well as semi-official
resources such as our own mailing lists and Bugzilla.

It is possible to find external links to a page using search engines.
For example, using "link:<url>" syntax in Google.

> Yes, I have added many
> redirects for the page moves. Each one I put in is weighed. I don't think it
> makes sense to put in a redirect for every single page that is moved for a
> few reasons. Firstly, since the wiki is pretty good at automatically finding
> the page when the original link is missing. So, when the page moves
> laterally or simply down, without changing the name the page suggestions are
> very good.

The list of suggested pages that is provided by moinmoin is pretty
good, but I have nonetheless come across moved pages where the new
location was either not shown or was mixed in with many (30-50+) other
suggestions. In both cases, someone who is not familiar with the new
wiki structure would probably be quite lost.

> Secondly, since it somewhat defeats the purpose of cleaning up
> the wiki if we duplicate every page we want to move. A redirect is a page.
> These pages show up in search and page listings - however they are not
> identified as redirects or differentiated from regular pages in any way.

We already have a robots.txt[1] which tells search engines to not
index redirects. We would ideally have a 301 redirect on those pages,
but this may not be possible with moinmoin.

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/robots.txt

> > This looks really bad and is probably quite
> > harmful to encouraging participation.
>
> Thank you for your support! I was really hoping that the weeks of effort
> I've been putting into this will have the intended effect. I was so worried
> for a while because everyone else seemed to be really positive about the
> work and thought that it would encourage participation by making things
> easier to find and generally giving off the impression that we care about
> our stuff - a well tended garden - broken windows theory and all that... I'm
> so glad you set us straight. Keep up the good work.

I find your comments here sarcastic and rude, and therefore
unproductive and offensive. While I want to contribute, I will not
continue doing so if you maintain this tone.

> > I have fixed some of those, but
> > this is very time consuming after the fact so it would be great if it
> > was possible to have some sort of script to do it automatically at the
> > point when pages are moved.
>
> As the person doing the work I can certainly attest to it being time
> consuming. I appreciate your help redirecting that one link today.
> (https://wiki.gnome.org/RecentChanges). Too bad we didn't have a script for
> you.

If you look at my wiki edits from today, you will find that they are
completely unrelated to the above discussion in that I moved the page
and then added the redirect because I know that an email containing
that link went out today… but I think you're on to something good
here, we probably should just redirect all moved pages automatically
and then we wouldn't need a script at all.