[Bf-docboard] Redirects cleanup and general wiki maintenance

[mindrones]

Hello,

I'm doing some automatic maintenance on the wikitext all over 
wiki.blender.org, fixing:

* double redirects (done)
* broken redirects (done)
* links that were redirects (almost done)

Also, I've moved all the {{K}} and {{KEY}} occurrences to {{shortcut}}, 
so now we have just one template for shortcuts.

I will do this kind of maintenance periodically, but without reporting 
anymore, this seems to work well. You can see this kind of maintenance 
in pages history, they are edits by the user "mindrones bot".

In case you find any glitch or minor problem while navigating, please 
let me know here or in #blenderwiki or fix it yourself if it's small, 
thanks.

For those interested, I'm reporting down here why I've done links 
redirect maintenance, as a public note.

WARNING: Very boring stuff from here on :)


Introduction
==============

Wiki makes an extensive use of redirect, which is a good thing because 
we are free to move pages (moving means just changing page name) without 
worrying about people's bookmarks or links in wiki still reporting the 
old page name.


Example
----------

* "Page1" redirects to "Page2", which redirects to "Page3"
* "PageA" contains a link to "Page1", [[Page1|foo]]
* When we click on "foo" wiki silently redirects us to "Page3"
* In the address bar we see the url
   http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Page3
   not
   http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Page1
* This is because in wiki.blender.org we have setup 301 redirects, also 
called "permanent redirects", see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection#HTTP_status_codes_3xx


What did we have
==================

Since after the wiki refactor, page naming is much different from the 
one we had 1 year ago, hence in the wikitext we still had the old links: 
in the example, the wikitext in "PageA" was still "[[Page1|foo]]"

This was problematic because:

1) pages had unexpected names: hovering a link one sees a url but, after 
clicking on it, the resulting page has a different name (this was 
reported by Ton too, in #blendercoders)

2) people tend to follow old naming conventions and so wiki maintainers 
have to move pages all the time, which is a very boring job to do btw :)

3) There were thousands of links that were redirects, hence the server 
was doing a lot of redirects al the time. Redirected are database 
lookups to know the real pagename of a link, hence more CPU load (and 
heat :)
   This is also valid for double or triple redirects, that were around 
2500: each time we clicked on a double redirect, that has meant 2 or 
even 3 lookups for the server --> CPU load --> heat.
   Maybe after this cleanup the server might even be a little bit faster.


Cleanup
=========

I've done some wiki cleanup to substitute links that are redirects with 
their real destination pagename, so that in the example in "PageA" we 
will find [[Page3|foo]] and not [[Page1|foo]] anymore.


-- 

Regards,
Luca

_____________________________

http://www.mindrones.com