Issue
As a user, I want to filter edits that create or change redirects so that I can focus on other changes, or cleanup vandalism.
Root problem
- Redirects considerably clutter the edits and make it harder to view legitimate edits.
- They often appear as "new pages" when in essence they could be thought of as metadata for the destination page.
Background
Consider this list of contributions (e.g. redirects, use Ctrl + F -> "redirect"). A considerable portion of edits are just users creating a disproportionate number of redirects. Looking at english wikipedia, redirects seem to be created for typos, alternate spellings, and vandalism ( redirect e.g. Thief -> John Doe).
The paper below provides a great write up on redirects for multiple purposes:
Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Shaw . 2014. Consider the Redirect: A Missing Dimension of Wikipedia Research - ACM Digital Library . .dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2641616 .
Proposed solution
Short term
- Add a redirect filter for recent changes - seems related( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T132840 with a patch, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T7040), much like the categorization filter .
Long term
- Add redirects log - with source and destination and run a script to backfill older entries .
Both the long and short term solutions are useful on their own (and together), but the long term solution would provide historical data, and make it possible to quickly find out if users ever used a redirect as an "attack page".