Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Remove limits from Special:ListRedirects or introduce a dedicated namespace for redirects

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Follow-up

Hey @Klein Muçi - thanks for sharing this wish. I'm reading through the wish and the relevant discussion you linked to. If you had a list of all redirects on your local wiki, how would you want to standardize them? If you haven't seen, there's been a pretty good discussion on phabricator about this ask. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T387537 JWheeler-WMF (talk) 21:57, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

@JWheeler-WMF, hello! I saw the Phabricator discussion and considered replying a couple of times, but I held back because I wasn’t sure how to frame my broader concerns effectively.

While my linked discussion focused on using Pywikibot for mass-editing redirects, that was just one specific case within a much larger issue we’re facing on my homewiki (Albanian Wikipedia). After surpassing 100k articles, we've shifted our focus to cleanup tasks, but one of the biggest challenges is the lack of efficient ways to filter different types of pages within the current MediaWiki setup. Redirects, disambiguation pages, lists, and short articles often overlap in queries, even though they serve distinct purposes and have, over time, become their own categories of content. However, because there’s no native way to differentiate them—like dedicated namespaces or built-in filtering—it’s difficult to manage them effectively at scale.

Larger wikis mitigate this with templates and categories, but smaller ones like ours lack the infrastructure to maintain such systems. Redirects, in particular, are a problem because they are often created unintentionally (e.g., from page moves) and then become difficult to track. (This is made worse by Pywikibot’s lack of page generators for special pages—so even if Special:ListRedirects were improved, programmatically handling them would still be cumbersome.)

My main concern is this broader structural issue, with redirects being just one example and Pywikibot limitations being only a small part of it. The Phabricator discussion is understandably focused on a narrower aspect of the request, which does align with my initial suggestion, but since my primary focus is on a more systemic challenge, I wasn’t sure how to contribute meaningfully there.

Ideally, native mechanisms for better classification and filtering would make a significant difference. One possible solution could be introducing dedicated namespaces for many of the page types I mentioned above, though I haven’t really thought about the potential drawbacks here. Alternatively, improving special pages to be more dynamic and removing restrictive limits could also be a step in the right direction (this ties into the current Phabricator discussion as well).

Hope this gives a bit more context about this wish. - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:12, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello @Klein Muçi,

Thank you for the additional context, it's helpful in understanding the broader structural concerns you're highlighting, beyond just the redirect limits.

While the MediaWiki Interfaces team is likely the best fit for evaluating it, they currently have limited capacity. That said, we both agree it’s a meaningful case that points to deeper system-level limitations around content classification and management.

We’ll keep it on our radar and appreciate how clearly you’ve laid out the pain points, both technical and organizational.

Thanks again for engaging so thoughtfully.

--ARamadan-WMF (talk) 14:11, 20 May 2025 (UTC)