Last modified: 2014-05-10 16:37:38 UTC
It appears that the DoubleRedirects special page lists pages according to the last internal link they contain, which is not necessarily the redirect link. For example, see this DoubleRedirect entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:DoubleRedirects&limit=1&offset=782 The page [[VRC St Leger Stakes]] actually redirects to [[VRC St Leger]] but contains additional content, in which the last internal link is to [[Group I]]. DoubleRedirects lists this page as a redirect to [[Group I]]. In fact, it seems that Whatlinkshere for [[Group I]] lists [[VRC St Leger Stakes]], so the problem isn't specific to the DoubleRedirects page, but rather to how links are stored. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Group_I Additionally, [[Wikipedia:Redirect]] states that "Everything after the redirect line will be blanked when you save the page.", but this appears to be incorrect.
Reviewing this again, it seems I read too much into what was happening. To the best of my understanding, the wiki keeps a record of all links from one page to another in the database. So when a redirect page has other content besides the redirect code, those links are stored as links from the redirect page (even though they are never actually visible). When the DoubleRedirects page looks for double redirects, it tries to find any link between one redirect page and another, even if that link isn't actually a redirect link. The way I see it, the solutions is one of the following: - Mark redirect links in the database differently from regular links. This would make finding them in DoubleRedirects simpler, as you won't need to check if the link is from/to a redirect 'page' as is done now. - Don't process other code in redirect pages for links, to not list those links in the link database. - Clear all content from a redirect page as stated in [[Wikipedia:Redirect]]. All of the above are just suggestions based on my quick review of the involved code.
It should retrieve the *first* link in the page. AS #REDIRECT doesn't work if it's below, that will always get the correct one. Are links stored on the database on the order they appear on the page?
No, there is no ordering whatsoever. A redirect should contain no markup other than the redirect; garbage in, garbage out. Eventually we should add separate tracking for redirect targets, though.
It also appears that this has a bad influence on the BrokenRedirects special page, in two aspects: - First, the obvious of a redirect article being interperted for links incorrectly could cause a redirect page to show up in BrokenRedirects because its contents has a broken link, even when the redirect link is in fact correct. - Second, some redirect templates contain broken links. The most obvious example is [[Template:R from alternate spelling]] which uses the [[Template:lts]] template to link to [[Template:R from spelling]]. The "R from spelling" template doesn't have a talk page, causing lots of proper redirect pages show up as broken redirects because they link to the non-existing [[Template talk:R from spelling]].
Should be fixable with the upcoming redirect table changes.
*** Bug 26531 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #5) > Should be fixable with the upcoming redirect table changes. Did anything happen with these table changes?
The tables were added awhile ago (bug 14418). The special page still needs fixing.
ah. Ok. Thank you.
