Last modified: 2014-10-22 11:10:37 UTC
Many wikipedia pages cover more than one object. They can have Bonnie and Clyde on the same page. They can have a Genus and it's only species an the same page. They can have a municipality and it's same name town on the same page. This is not a problem for Wikipedia and there is no reason for them to change. If other language wikipedias have a separate page for each instance/object then there is no easy way to create site links between these pages and the multi object pages. If we could have sitelinks to redirects then the wikipedia pages with single objects could link to the wikipedia pages with multiple objects. (Site links the other way would end up on the redirect pages so that wouldn't help but at least it is something). Wikidata could probably manage without this functionality as the Wikidata page for the multi-object wikipedia pages can use the "consists of" property to link to a separate wikidata page for each object, whether or not these have sitelinks. Nevertheless it would be nice to have the sitelinks as these help establish notability. Workflow: If you try and create a sitelink to a redirect page a popup asks you "This is a redirect page. "Do you want to link to this redirect page? Yes? "Do want to link to this other page the redirect points at? Yes?"
Thanks for taking the time to report this! You mention wikivoyage in the bug summary but nowhere in the initial comment, which confuses me. Could you come up with a specific example (page that exists), and explain what you would like to do, and why?
"Bonnie and Clyde" (Q219937) has sitelinks to 31 wikipedias. "Bonnie Parker" (Q2319886) has links to 4 wikipedias. "Clyde Barrow" (Q3320282) has links to 3 wikipedias. Dutch (nl:) and Norwegian (no:) wikipedias have pages on Bonnie Parker and on Clyde Barrow as well as pages on Bonnie and Clyde. Portugese wikipedia (pt:) has pages on Bonnie Parker and on Clyde Barrow but does not have a page which covers both of them together. http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_Parker http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Barrow The "Bonnie Parker" item (Q2319886) has links to the pt:, nl: and no: pages on Bonnie Parker and to the German page on "Bonnie and Clyde" via a German redirect page. This link to a redirect page was created using a hack - Create a stub page: Create a link to this: Convert the stub to a redirect. If this bug is resolved then we won't need to use the hack described above to create links to redirect pages. We can create links from the wikidata page on Bonnie Parker to any of the 31 pages on the wikidata "Bonnie and Clyde" page which have suitable redirect pages as well as the links to other "Bonnie Parker" pages (ie nl: and no:.) so this page could have 31 links instead of 4 and it would link to all the wikipedias with relevant information rather than just linking to identical pages.
The same issue can happen in wikivoyage where different vikivoyages divide the world slightly differently - one divides a large city in 4 articles and another does it in one article.
I don't think we should move forward with this until Denny's comments at http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/A_need_for_a_resolution_regarding_article_moves_and_redirects#Clarification have been considered. I don't feel this has happened. From what I can see the decision was made without being aware of the consequences by most people.
Here are Denny's comment: In case we modify the software so it does allow to link to redirects, I wanted to clarify that this would have the following consequences: 1. when entering a link into the Wikidata item to a Wikipedia, redirects will not be automatically resolved anymore. 2. a Wikipedia article will still only display the language links that are on the directly associated item in Wikidata, and additionally local links, but it will not collect those from redirects. 3. a Wikipedia article will not be able to directly access data from an item connected to a redirect to the article, but only to the item directly connected to the article. I don't need an extension or a second round of RFC, but I just wanted to make sure that this is understood before we implement the change. Cheers, --Denny (talk) 10:25, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
Response to Denny's comments: 1. Redirects will not be automatically resolved but we should be able to bring up a dialog box to give editors the option to go to the redirect destination. 2. This is the same as the situation now. 3. This is the same as the situation now but there is a workround to indirectly access the items. This proposal is not a solution to all problems but it does solve some, without breaking wikidata. Denny said he did not need an extension or a second round of RFC but now Lydia seems to be saying a new RFC is needed (How else can we answer the issue she raised?)
filceolaire: Your answer and the discussion could likely go to the RFC wikipage.
Bug 40755 describes an other solution of this problem based on __STATICREDIRECT__.
*** Bug 40755 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 71859 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
In order for things like the Wikidata Game and WikiGrok to work seamlessly across different language projects I think we will need to get this bug fixed. Currently the ontology of items is a real mess across different languages since we are often treating all redirects as equivalent items to their target (in order to avoid the interwiki link fragmentation seen with Bonnie and Clyde). This potentially creates absurd situations where claims intended for individuals are applied to groups (or vice versa), or claims intended for songs are applied to albums (or vice versa), etc.
@Lydia: I responded to each of Danny's point in the thread (http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/A_need_for_a_resolution_regarding_article_moves_and_redirects#Clarification). TL;DR version: It is clear that this won't solve all of our problems, but I think it will be an improvement on the current situation. In particular it doesn't solve for the problem of "Bonnie and Clyde" linking to "Bonnie" and "Clyde", but I don't see any practical solution to that problem. It does, however, completely solve for the hatmaking/hatmaker problem which is also very common.
