Soyjak Wiki:Navigation Popups/Fixing Redirects

This topic relates to this very wikiHere be edit wars, censorship and template spam.

Parts of this page are modified Wikipedia imports.

Some users using the Navigation popups gadget might be making rule-breaking use of the popupFixRedirs feature. Wikipedia editors started to believe using this feature reduces the workload on Wikipedia servers, but in reality, it's an oppositefag.

Say you come across a perfectly legitimate redirect link, for instance (Guinness World Record Soyjak redirects to Gapejak):

Wikitext	Display
[[Gapejak#Appearance & Behaviour|Guiness World Record Soyjak]] is a gemmy Soyjak.	Guinness World Record Soyjak is a gemmy Soyjak.

The popupFixRedirs feature allows you to hover over the Guinness World Record Soyjak link, click Redirects, and change the text to:

Wikitext	Display
[[Gapejak|Guiness World Record Soyjak]] is a gemmy soyjak.	Guinness World Record Soyjak is a gemmy soyjak.

Don't even try it on this one either. Popups fix every case of a redirect where it finds what it refers to on a page, then this whole essay will make no sense. Just don't, okay?

Myth and Fact

The new wikitext avoids the redirect and goes straight to the right page, so it must be better on the servers, and you're performing a great service by fixing the bad link, right?

Wrong, it doesnt really work like that.

• When a reader clicks on a redirected link (say, Guinness World Record Soyjak), the MediaWiki software performs SQL queries to locate the destination page. That query includes a check as to whether the requested destination is a redirect (every page includes a database field called page.page_is_redirect), and if so, it returns the location of the redirected page. In other words, while it's technically true that it's more expensive to follow a redirect than a direct link, it's only the tiniest hair more expensive. (For those who care, the actual number on a 2006 version of MediaWiki was 44 SELECT statements to follow a direct link versus 48 to follow a redirect.)
• The editor's action of using Popups to fix a single redirect has MediaWiki do more SQL queries than it takes to follow the redirect, but it also has to do several database transactions and writes. (To be exact, 8 transactions with 64 SELECTs, 10 UPDATEs, 4 INSERTs, and 2 DELETEs, on that same version of MediaWiki.)
• Database updates – that is, write operations – are several orders of magnitude more expensive on the servers than database queries — that is, read operations. A benchmark ran in January 2006 showed that fixing a redirect is approximately ten thousand times more expensive for the server than following that redirect.