User talk:Super aardvark

Welcome to factorio! We hope you will contribute much and well. You will probably want to read the help pages. Again, welcome and have fun! Mishka (talk) 11:17, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Please do not create pages purely to redirect to other pages.

Hey there, you seem to be new. I'd like to ask that you not create pages purely to redirect to other pages. The search function will still point to the correct page, and making pages that have no inbound links (no pages link to them) purely to redirect is only spam. Thanks, and happy editing! If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to ask me, I'm here to help. --Gangsir (talk) 01:41, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, I figured I'd save the next guy a trip to the search results. Could you explain why you don't like such redirects? Are you trying to keep Special:AllPages as short as possible for some reason? --Super aardvark (talk) 04:13, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Sure, there's a few reasons. Mainly, it's because the search function will handle any search, by looking for text in pages, a bit like the find function in a browser. For example, if you search the phrase "fire", you'll be brought to a search results page that will list pages that contain the word "fire", such as Flamethrower, Turret, etc. There's no real reason to make pages simply for this purpose, as search will handle searches that don't match page names just fine. Lots of people make this mistake, not noticing the power of MediaWiki's search. There's a few rules of "etiquette" if you will when it comes to wiki editing, good practices that make for professional, easy to read wikis. I've got experience with editing other wikis, so I try to keep Factorio's wiki within these guidelines as much as I can.

There's a few other reasons for creating redirect pages, don't get me wrong. It's okay to create redirect pages if there are a good number of red links that point to the wrong page; instead of fixing those, you can create a redirect to the proper page. Or, if spelling varies by region, creating redirects for that is okay too. (Ex Color <-> Colour) It's not really to keep the number of pages down, more so to avoid problems with creating too many unnecessary redirect pages. (I can explain further if you're interested in how MediaWiki handles redirects)

It's okay though, you didn't know. Don't let me discourage you from continuing to contribute. :) Cheers, --Gangsir (talk) 20:43, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

I'd love to hear about why too many redirect pages is a problem for MediaWiki. There was a time when I was a somewhat active wikipedian (nothing crazy, a couple hundred edits maybe), and the only concern I ever was aware of was not to have redirects pointing to other redirects. --Super aardvark (talk) 01:45, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

Oh, were you? Great. Most of my experience is non-Wikipedia, so I/this wiki might handle things differently than they do. Basically, like you said, redirects can't point to other redirects(the second redirect just gets stuck, to prevent long chains of redirects/infinite loops). In addition to that rule, the reason why you don't want lots of redirects is mainly because of possible points of failure. For example, say you're moving a very old, heavily linked-to page. When you move a page, a redirect is created. Any redirects that used to point to that page(which is now a redirect to the new name) are now double redirects, broken. (As far as I can tell/have seen, that may have changed in newer versions of MW, disregard this one if so)

But that's not all. What about deleting a page. Now, the tons of redirect pages that led to that page (exaggerating here, it might only be 1-3, but you get it) now lead to a deleted page, and bother has to be taken to remove/fix them. So, it's best to keep it minimalistic in terms of redirecting. It's not really a hard, "everything's going to break if you do this" type rule, more so a guideline to reduce workload. :) Of course, it's still good to check the special pages every so often to see if there are any currently error-ing redirects. --Gangsir (talk) 02:20, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

That makes a ton of sense. Thanks for explaining! --Super aardvark (talk) 19:49, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

Absolutely no problem! If you have any questions about MediaWiki, this wiki in particular, or anything else, don't hesitate to ask me! Part of my duties as an admin is answering questions of new users. Hope to see you sticking around and contributing in the future. :) --Gangsir (talk) 20:44, 21 September 2016 (UTC)