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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was: Keep (Speedy Deleted of any as requested by their user page owners) Valid arguments for limited tests of things in userspace have been persented. — xaosflux Talk 01:42, 28 October 2016 (UTC) reply

Userspace circular redirects

Double redirects are a navigational hazard where a redirect points to another redirect. These are primarily fixed by bots.

Circular redirects are redirect loops that never end with a page. Circular redirects are unhelpful because you will forever be redirected to a redirect. Furthermore, they clutter the Special:DoubleRedirects log unnecessarily and offer no benefit. There already are examples of it in Wikipedia namespace (for whatever the reason):

-- A Certain White Cat chi? 18:35, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

User:Amalthea/rd1 forms a permanent double redirect because of its page protection. Bots cannot edit it. Its page history demonstrates multiple fix attempts by different users that were reverted. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 18:51, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
  • I'm a software developer at the Wikimedia Foundation and I use pages in my user space for testing the mediawiki software. Please never touch pages in my user space. Pchelolo ( talk) 19:00, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
    @ Pchelolo: I do not see there relevance of your employer. There is a testwiki if you want to test stuff. English Wikipedia isn't there for testing anything. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 19:18, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
    If the Foundation determines that you need to use en.wiki for testing, it should probably be done from an identity-confirmed WMF-tagged account. I'm also not sure how this sort of thing is constructive testing. In any case, I've tagged it CSD G8 as the user page of a non-existent account. Squeamish Ossifrage ( talk) 21:58, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • Delete It was an experiment I did to see if you would not reach a double redirect page and would have an infinite loop of page loading. It can go now, it's served it's purpose. I also agree with とある白い猫 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Skynorth ( talk • contribs) 19:08, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • I'll delete the pages within your userspace. Thanks for taking the time to comment. Nick ( talk) 19:25, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • 1) A page in my userspace that isn't linked to is no "navigational hazard". 2) My redirect test pages are flagged with the nobots-template. Bots should respect that and silently ignore them. 3) Testwiki is not sufficient if you want to actually test configuration of en-wiki; 4) Special:DoubleRedirects is processed by bots; no human should really be concerned about the pages there.
    That being said, I don't care that much anymore. Years ago MediaWiki got a new feature to allow configuration of longer redirect chains than 1, and we had a consensus to extend it by one; sadly, it never was implemented.
    If there is consensus that the above pages are problematic and should not exist then I will not object; but I don't see why anyone can really be bothered by them.
    Amalthea 19:39, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
    • @ Amalthea: The issue here is they fill up the special page. No on-wiki configuration will have any impact on how double redirects work. I am one of the people that operate said bots. If bot hits a page that is a double redirect, it attempts to repair it. It is less of an issue when this happens on one page only. It becomes an issue when these numbers increase. Bear in mind I operate this bot on hundreds of wikis so even slight delays pile up over time. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 20:28, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
      • If the filling of that special page is an issue, fix the filling of that special page so that userspace is excluded. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 23:39, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
        • @ SmokeyJoe: So instead of deleting or de-linking a few useless pages, you want developers to change an already working code? Furthermore, if I go to someones userpage or talk page and it turns out that the signature links lead to a double redirect, I will end up with a redirect page rather than the actual page so excluding user namespace or user talk namespace would be counterproductive. This happens whenever a username is renamed more than once as the entire userspace is moved in each case. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 11:46, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
          • Users have broad leeway in their own userspace. Poorly designed maintenance tools are poor justification for lightly asserting uselessnesses in others' userspace. Signature issues are covered by WP:Signature, is there a WP:Signature issue? -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 21:14, 19 October 2016 (UTC) reply
            • @ SmokeyJoe: What benefit do circular redirects serve? This is NOT the purpose of redirects. Might I suggest you take a look at SpecialDoubleRedirects.php#L35. This is what generates the special page. As you can see it is marked isExpensive() = true. MediaWiki queries on WMF that generates the special pages have a finite limit of 5,000 entries. So if these entries keep piling up like they have, we would have article namespace double redirects that go undetected as log would stop at the 5,000 cut off point. These circular redirects are as demonstrated above do disrupt the operation beyond the user spaces they reside on. Modifications to the query as you suggested above would require consensus by the rest of the community, someone would then need to program it, test it and deploy it. None of those is trivial. The alternative is not permitting such userspace circular redirects which would take us no more than 3.2 minutes.
            I operate my bot on practically every wiki, any redundant entry has an impact on the performance of the bot as it taxes bots time. Bot can cope with it mind you, it just delays things for quite a bit as each wiki has some permanent entries that are unfixable due to page protection and circular redirects. Each entry adds a redundent second or two to the bots task as bot needs to process it. If this happened to just 5-10 pages Wikimedia-wide, it wouldn't be an issue. But with few permanent double redirects it adds up.
            -- A Certain White Cat chi? 22:32, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
            • You're still going on about technical issues with maintenance assistance tools. You are alluding to Wikipedia:Performance issues. If there is one, then get a developer to explain it to us. Otherwise, what I see is a maintenance hobbyist trying to make the project fit his maintenance style. Trying to expand the maintenance bureaucracy to meet the needs of the expanding maintenance bureaucracy. No. Leave users and their userpage alone. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 23:48, 19 October 2016 (UTC) reply
              • @ SmokeyJoe: I do not know how to respond to this. Are you bothered that I am a volunteer or that I help with a mindless automated task? Some of us want to keep backlogs down. No one is after userpages. Any userpage activity that shows up on an expensive query should be dealt with. Your userpage is not your private property. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 07:34, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
                • Why don't you try editing the redirects, placing a note explaining the problem, and breaking the redirects? But come straight to MfD to delete userpages with history? No. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 11:12, 20 October 2016 (UTC) reply
                  • @ SmokeyJoe: I am open to any methods of removing the circular redirects as circular redirects offer no benefit to anyone. Deletion is the obvious choice since after removing the circular redirects, pages loose their purpose. Mind you what you suggest is exactly what happened with the stroked out nomination. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 18:48, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Yo, I've made mine no longer redirects. I'd prefer them to just stay that way over being deleted, so the page history remains public, but if that's a problem… (I'd like to export them though if they'll be getting deleted, but if they aren't, I don't feel like going to the trouble…) Thanks :) —{{u| Goldenshimmer}}|✝️|ze/zer|😹| T/C|☮️|John15:12|🍂 19:49, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
    If the page no longer shows up on the special page then you have nothing to worry about. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 20:28, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Keep. They are not a hazard in userspace. Imagined problem where none exists. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 23:36, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
    • They may not be a navigational hazard, however they are obviously posing an issue with a bot that runs across multiple WMF projects. So this isn't an "imagined problem". As far as I can tell these pages aren't here to build an encyclopedia so why should they be kept? -- Cameron11598 (Talk) 16:51, 24 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • Keep per SmokeyJoe above. They are their own user subpages, and it should be the user who deals with them. ∞😃 Target360YT 😃∞ ( talk · contribs) 03:08, 19 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • @ とある白い猫: I don't even see why you put [[Special:PrefixIndex/User:Cubedev2539/sandbox/TestingPages/Bounce|User:Cubedev2539/sandbox/TestingPages/Bounce*}} into the list. Those are sandboxes, you know... That is a 100% keep for those pages. ∞😃 Target360YT 😃∞ ( talk · contribs) 03:19, 19 October 2016 (UTC) reply
    • @ Target360YT: They cluter the log. The problem is not isolated to the userspace. Detection of double redirects is a computationally heavy process which is why it is run infrequently. Sandbox is not the litterbox. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 11:42, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Don't run the double redirect detection process. Problem solved. I understand the mainspace double redirects are looked after and fixed in another way, and that in all other cases redirects are so cheap that this maintenance is unjustified. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 23:50, 19 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • @ SmokeyJoe: As explained above, they are not cheap. We get 300-700 of them per cycle (probably a day). If you multiply that by 365.25, you get 109,575-255,675 redirects that are affected each year. How do you suggest such pages are handled if we turn off the detection? I do not run the detection mind you, that is done at the WMF server backend. Bear in mind that current log is capped at 5,000 entries so if bots aren't run frequently enough, in about 2 weeks the log would be full of entries. I find it quite distressing how you are trying to make the issue of double redirects, THE most routine maintenance task even global bots are automatically authorized, controversial. I honestly find that disruptive. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 20:31, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
@ Godsy: I am unsure if circular redirects would qualify as such since they do not actually redirect to a target. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 22:14, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Me too. RfD is supposed to deal with things with trivial or negligible material in the page history, and this nomination is requesting deletion of others' archives. It is an old practice, used by some users, to archive old usersubpage by converting to a redirect. There are various reasons why this might make sense, although I am not aware of any reason to archive as a set of circular redirects. The most normal redirect-archive is done by either redirecting to the user's main userpage, or to the related mainspace article. The only reason I can think of for creating circular redirects is to test what happens. I could destroy Wikipedia or even the internet! See Logic bomb, Fork bomb, ExplosiveOverclocking. (it doesn't).
MfD-ing these pages was overkill. Deletion is fine if the user agrees. A better solution is to break the redirects. Blank them. Convert them to soft redirects. Add a note. Write an essay on the evil consequences of userspace circular redirects and put a point to it on the redirect page. All will solve the alleged problem without deletion of anyone's records. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 22:53, 25 October 2016 (UTC) reply
@ SmokeyJoe: This is trivial. It has always been routine maintenance just like how broken redirects are speedy deleted. Circular redirects never serve a purpose this encyclopedia needs. Our policy on deletions does not require the consent of the user. Circular redirects can be speedy deleted under WP:CSD#G8 actually, which includes any redirect that does not point to a page. The purpose of this nomination was to form consensus on the specific matter. You have disrupted that with your irrational claims. Aside from the LOUD you, views above are pretty clear to me. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 08:50, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.


Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Userspace_circular_redirects&oldid=1073540618"
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was: Keep (Speedy Deleted of any as requested by their user page owners) Valid arguments for limited tests of things in userspace have been persented. — xaosflux Talk 01:42, 28 October 2016 (UTC) reply

Userspace circular redirects

Double redirects are a navigational hazard where a redirect points to another redirect. These are primarily fixed by bots.

Circular redirects are redirect loops that never end with a page. Circular redirects are unhelpful because you will forever be redirected to a redirect. Furthermore, they clutter the Special:DoubleRedirects log unnecessarily and offer no benefit. There already are examples of it in Wikipedia namespace (for whatever the reason):

-- A Certain White Cat chi? 18:35, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

User:Amalthea/rd1 forms a permanent double redirect because of its page protection. Bots cannot edit it. Its page history demonstrates multiple fix attempts by different users that were reverted. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 18:51, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
  • I'm a software developer at the Wikimedia Foundation and I use pages in my user space for testing the mediawiki software. Please never touch pages in my user space. Pchelolo ( talk) 19:00, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
    @ Pchelolo: I do not see there relevance of your employer. There is a testwiki if you want to test stuff. English Wikipedia isn't there for testing anything. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 19:18, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
    If the Foundation determines that you need to use en.wiki for testing, it should probably be done from an identity-confirmed WMF-tagged account. I'm also not sure how this sort of thing is constructive testing. In any case, I've tagged it CSD G8 as the user page of a non-existent account. Squeamish Ossifrage ( talk) 21:58, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • Delete It was an experiment I did to see if you would not reach a double redirect page and would have an infinite loop of page loading. It can go now, it's served it's purpose. I also agree with とある白い猫 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Skynorth ( talk • contribs) 19:08, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • I'll delete the pages within your userspace. Thanks for taking the time to comment. Nick ( talk) 19:25, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • 1) A page in my userspace that isn't linked to is no "navigational hazard". 2) My redirect test pages are flagged with the nobots-template. Bots should respect that and silently ignore them. 3) Testwiki is not sufficient if you want to actually test configuration of en-wiki; 4) Special:DoubleRedirects is processed by bots; no human should really be concerned about the pages there.
    That being said, I don't care that much anymore. Years ago MediaWiki got a new feature to allow configuration of longer redirect chains than 1, and we had a consensus to extend it by one; sadly, it never was implemented.
    If there is consensus that the above pages are problematic and should not exist then I will not object; but I don't see why anyone can really be bothered by them.
    Amalthea 19:39, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
    • @ Amalthea: The issue here is they fill up the special page. No on-wiki configuration will have any impact on how double redirects work. I am one of the people that operate said bots. If bot hits a page that is a double redirect, it attempts to repair it. It is less of an issue when this happens on one page only. It becomes an issue when these numbers increase. Bear in mind I operate this bot on hundreds of wikis so even slight delays pile up over time. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 20:28, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
      • If the filling of that special page is an issue, fix the filling of that special page so that userspace is excluded. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 23:39, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
        • @ SmokeyJoe: So instead of deleting or de-linking a few useless pages, you want developers to change an already working code? Furthermore, if I go to someones userpage or talk page and it turns out that the signature links lead to a double redirect, I will end up with a redirect page rather than the actual page so excluding user namespace or user talk namespace would be counterproductive. This happens whenever a username is renamed more than once as the entire userspace is moved in each case. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 11:46, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
          • Users have broad leeway in their own userspace. Poorly designed maintenance tools are poor justification for lightly asserting uselessnesses in others' userspace. Signature issues are covered by WP:Signature, is there a WP:Signature issue? -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 21:14, 19 October 2016 (UTC) reply
            • @ SmokeyJoe: What benefit do circular redirects serve? This is NOT the purpose of redirects. Might I suggest you take a look at SpecialDoubleRedirects.php#L35. This is what generates the special page. As you can see it is marked isExpensive() = true. MediaWiki queries on WMF that generates the special pages have a finite limit of 5,000 entries. So if these entries keep piling up like they have, we would have article namespace double redirects that go undetected as log would stop at the 5,000 cut off point. These circular redirects are as demonstrated above do disrupt the operation beyond the user spaces they reside on. Modifications to the query as you suggested above would require consensus by the rest of the community, someone would then need to program it, test it and deploy it. None of those is trivial. The alternative is not permitting such userspace circular redirects which would take us no more than 3.2 minutes.
            I operate my bot on practically every wiki, any redundant entry has an impact on the performance of the bot as it taxes bots time. Bot can cope with it mind you, it just delays things for quite a bit as each wiki has some permanent entries that are unfixable due to page protection and circular redirects. Each entry adds a redundent second or two to the bots task as bot needs to process it. If this happened to just 5-10 pages Wikimedia-wide, it wouldn't be an issue. But with few permanent double redirects it adds up.
            -- A Certain White Cat chi? 22:32, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
            • You're still going on about technical issues with maintenance assistance tools. You are alluding to Wikipedia:Performance issues. If there is one, then get a developer to explain it to us. Otherwise, what I see is a maintenance hobbyist trying to make the project fit his maintenance style. Trying to expand the maintenance bureaucracy to meet the needs of the expanding maintenance bureaucracy. No. Leave users and their userpage alone. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 23:48, 19 October 2016 (UTC) reply
              • @ SmokeyJoe: I do not know how to respond to this. Are you bothered that I am a volunteer or that I help with a mindless automated task? Some of us want to keep backlogs down. No one is after userpages. Any userpage activity that shows up on an expensive query should be dealt with. Your userpage is not your private property. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 07:34, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
                • Why don't you try editing the redirects, placing a note explaining the problem, and breaking the redirects? But come straight to MfD to delete userpages with history? No. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 11:12, 20 October 2016 (UTC) reply
                  • @ SmokeyJoe: I am open to any methods of removing the circular redirects as circular redirects offer no benefit to anyone. Deletion is the obvious choice since after removing the circular redirects, pages loose their purpose. Mind you what you suggest is exactly what happened with the stroked out nomination. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 18:48, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Yo, I've made mine no longer redirects. I'd prefer them to just stay that way over being deleted, so the page history remains public, but if that's a problem… (I'd like to export them though if they'll be getting deleted, but if they aren't, I don't feel like going to the trouble…) Thanks :) —{{u| Goldenshimmer}}|✝️|ze/zer|😹| T/C|☮️|John15:12|🍂 19:49, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
    If the page no longer shows up on the special page then you have nothing to worry about. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 20:28, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Keep. They are not a hazard in userspace. Imagined problem where none exists. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 23:36, 18 October 2016 (UTC) reply
    • They may not be a navigational hazard, however they are obviously posing an issue with a bot that runs across multiple WMF projects. So this isn't an "imagined problem". As far as I can tell these pages aren't here to build an encyclopedia so why should they be kept? -- Cameron11598 (Talk) 16:51, 24 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • Keep per SmokeyJoe above. They are their own user subpages, and it should be the user who deals with them. ∞😃 Target360YT 😃∞ ( talk · contribs) 03:08, 19 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • @ とある白い猫: I don't even see why you put [[Special:PrefixIndex/User:Cubedev2539/sandbox/TestingPages/Bounce|User:Cubedev2539/sandbox/TestingPages/Bounce*}} into the list. Those are sandboxes, you know... That is a 100% keep for those pages. ∞😃 Target360YT 😃∞ ( talk · contribs) 03:19, 19 October 2016 (UTC) reply
    • @ Target360YT: They cluter the log. The problem is not isolated to the userspace. Detection of double redirects is a computationally heavy process which is why it is run infrequently. Sandbox is not the litterbox. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 11:42, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Don't run the double redirect detection process. Problem solved. I understand the mainspace double redirects are looked after and fixed in another way, and that in all other cases redirects are so cheap that this maintenance is unjustified. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 23:50, 19 October 2016 (UTC) reply
  • @ SmokeyJoe: As explained above, they are not cheap. We get 300-700 of them per cycle (probably a day). If you multiply that by 365.25, you get 109,575-255,675 redirects that are affected each year. How do you suggest such pages are handled if we turn off the detection? I do not run the detection mind you, that is done at the WMF server backend. Bear in mind that current log is capped at 5,000 entries so if bots aren't run frequently enough, in about 2 weeks the log would be full of entries. I find it quite distressing how you are trying to make the issue of double redirects, THE most routine maintenance task even global bots are automatically authorized, controversial. I honestly find that disruptive. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 20:31, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
@ Godsy: I am unsure if circular redirects would qualify as such since they do not actually redirect to a target. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 22:14, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Me too. RfD is supposed to deal with things with trivial or negligible material in the page history, and this nomination is requesting deletion of others' archives. It is an old practice, used by some users, to archive old usersubpage by converting to a redirect. There are various reasons why this might make sense, although I am not aware of any reason to archive as a set of circular redirects. The most normal redirect-archive is done by either redirecting to the user's main userpage, or to the related mainspace article. The only reason I can think of for creating circular redirects is to test what happens. I could destroy Wikipedia or even the internet! See Logic bomb, Fork bomb, ExplosiveOverclocking. (it doesn't).
MfD-ing these pages was overkill. Deletion is fine if the user agrees. A better solution is to break the redirects. Blank them. Convert them to soft redirects. Add a note. Write an essay on the evil consequences of userspace circular redirects and put a point to it on the redirect page. All will solve the alleged problem without deletion of anyone's records. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 22:53, 25 October 2016 (UTC) reply
@ SmokeyJoe: This is trivial. It has always been routine maintenance just like how broken redirects are speedy deleted. Circular redirects never serve a purpose this encyclopedia needs. Our policy on deletions does not require the consent of the user. Circular redirects can be speedy deleted under WP:CSD#G8 actually, which includes any redirect that does not point to a page. The purpose of this nomination was to form consensus on the specific matter. You have disrupted that with your irrational claims. Aside from the LOUD you, views above are pretty clear to me. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 08:50, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.


Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Userspace_circular_redirects&oldid=1073540618"

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