[OSM-talk] Own wikipage for every single speed limit??

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2014-09-05 13:22, Jochen Topf wrote:
> On Fr, Sep 05, 2014 at 12:51:40 -0700, Minh Nguyen wrote:
>> On 2014-08-28 04:37, Jochen Topf wrote:
>>> Redirect pages can have a bad effect, though. Taginfo will show if a wiki page
>>> exists for a key or tag. Taginfo can't know why there is a redirect. Is this a
>>> case where the redirect directs from a "typo page" to the "real page" or is
>>> this a case where, like in the maxspeed case, several pages for totally
>>> good tags have been rolled into one. So taginfo shows them all the same and
>>> might lead people into thinking the "typo key" is the real one, if they don't
>>> click through to the page.
>>>
>>> The problem behind this is that there is no way to mark the reason why there is
>>> a redirect. It could be "old now discontinued name", or "common misspelling",
>>> or "this page would be basically a copy of this other one, so look there", or
>>> probably some other reasons. Redirects hide this information, that could be
>>> written down on the page instead. So I think redirects should be avoided. In
>>> particular, misspellings would be better handled by having a slightly fuzzy
>>> search (not sure how good MediaWiki is for that).
>>
>> At Wikipedia, templates are categorized using a series of templates like {{R
>> from misspelling}}. You just place them on the line following the #redirect
>> tag. Could taginfo be made to look for these templates or the categories
>> they sort into?
>>
>> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:R_from_misspelling
>
> It could. But humans will not see anything in those redirect pages without
> jumping through hoops, so I think this makes a bad situation even worse.

Redirect templates do add a human-readable message to the page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antartic_Treaty?redirect=no

However, you do have to click the "Redirected from" link to see that 
message [1], and links to the redirect page show up as ordinary blue 
links [2]. The latter problem can be addressed by adding this rule to 
the wiki's MediaWiki:Common.css:

.mw-redirect {
     background-color: #ddeeff;
}

To be clear, I'm not speaking out in favor of redirects for numeric tags 
like maxspeed=20. {{tag|maxspeed||20}} is definitely the right way to 
link to that tag. Rather, I see redirects as being useful for obsolete, 
haven't-tagged-this-way-since-2004 tags, or for American English tags 
where the British equivalent is preferred (e.g., amenity=theater). 
Perhaps the obsolete and dialectal tags merit their own "soft redirect" 
pages, in MediaWiki parlance, but a hard redirect is better than nothing.

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/2012
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/42880

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us