[Bf-docboard] Allow documentors to help manage redirects?

[gandalf3]

For new users in particular it may not be easy to find the section they 
were linked to, as it's sometimes buried under multiple layers of index 
pages.
Many links now seem rather meaningless. For example a lot SE posts are 
filled with links targeted at specific parts of a section of documentation.
Now those posts are filled with a lot of links to the same index page, 
usually with text like "adjust <setting> to do xyz", which doesn't make 
much sense when <setting> goes to an index page.

IMO It's a lot easier to define a redirect for every page than to edit 
every link in even one corner of the internet such as SE.
We will already be editing (even rewriting in some cases) most of the 
pages in the manual at some point or another.
Compared to that, IMO defining a redirect for every page (or at least 
most pages) doesn't seem too bad, assuming it's about as quick as typing 
"/path/to/wiki/page -> /path/to/manual/page".

Where does the maintenance come in? Once a page is redirected, I would 
expect that to be the end of that.. Right?


Translations are important, but I think useful links are important too. 
I'm not a translator, so I doubt I could be of much help in a 
translation project. But while the manual is being translated I could 
redirect things ;)
Also, much of the documentation is out of date/inconsistently 
styled/just needs to be redone, so not sure if translating is a good 
idea before at least some of the pages are deemed to be in solid shape?

I'm not familiar with Sphinx, but I was thinking even just big file 
filled with stuff like

/wiki/page             ->     /manual/page
/other/wiki/page     ->     /manual/other/page
/wiki/page/other     ->     /other/page/manual

or perhaps some specially formatted comment at the top of each manual 
page containing the url(s) of it's wiki equivalent(s) might work?

Then some script could collect all these and put them in proper 
redirection shape, whatever and wherever that may be.

On 06/02/15 00:03, Francesco Siddi wrote:
> Hi,
> we have currently set up section-wide redirects, which point the user 
> in the right direction. This global approach was chosen because 
> setting up individual redirects is time consuming and requires extra 
> maintenance.
>
> As afar as I know, Sphinx does not support smart redirection in the 
> same way MediaWiki does, so I don’t think setting up pages to make 
> manual redirects is a good idea.
>
> If you can share a practical example of how we could do this it would 
> be very interesting, but I first rather focus on the topic of 
> translations, which is still a bit fuzzy.
>
> Best regards,
> Francesco
>
>
> On 31 May 2015 at 21:20:44, gandalf3 (zzyxpaw at gmail.com 
> <mailto:zzyxpaw at gmail.com>) wrote:
>
>> I've yet to find any link to the old wiki which goes to the correct page
>> on the new manual.
>> Since there are probably thousands of links to the wiki, this is pretty
>> important to fix.
>>
>> Assuming that manual pages will get moved around more and eventually
>> differ significantly from the structure of the old wiki, it sounds like
>> it may not be feasible to get the wiki to redirect correctly with a few
>> regex magics. Would it be possible to add some kind of file in the
>> manual repo that documentors could edit to manually define redirects?
>>
>> This would also help with redirecting future structure changes/page 
>> renames.
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> -gandalf3
>>
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>
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-- 
-gandalf3

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