Forums: Village pump → Mass updating links on page move.
(This topic is archived. Please do not edit this page!)
(This topic is archived. Please do not edit this page!)
Is there any way, or does anyone have a bot that can mass-update links to point at a new page after a move? We just added a disambig for Tank, but there's a whopping 290 internal links that now (would if not for a temp redirect hack) point at the disambig instead of the game term page they're supposed to. Is there a quick way of updating all of these? Binkyuk (talk) 14:47, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
- I don't think a bot would do a good job, since the re-linking requires knowing the context. --
Fandyllic (talk · contr) 4:10 PM PST 8 May 2009
- Previously there was only one page, so all existing links point at one place. Binkyuk (talk) 23:44, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
- The problem is you want the existing links to point to the new separate pages and not the disambig page, right? I don't see how a bot is going to figure out the context of a link and change it to the right new link. Since the first meaning is by far the most commonly used one and there are only three alternatives, it may not have been a good idea to make tank into a disambig page. It might have been better to have tank be tank (game term) and just have disambig links at its top to tank (vehicle) and plague tank. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:02 PM PST 11 May 2009
- The problem is you want the existing links to point to the new separate pages and not the disambig page, right? I don't see how a bot is going to figure out the context of a link and change it to the right new link. Since the first meaning is by far the most commonly used one and there are only three alternatives, it may not have been a good idea to make tank into a disambig page. It might have been better to have tank be tank (game term) and just have disambig links at its top to tank (vehicle) and plague tank. --
- Well... yes that was my opinion, but others did not agree and reverted it when I did that, so I'm trying to accommodate them. Unfortunately it may be a little late for this example as it's now been many days and new links will have been added since the move that may refer to either context. In general though, if we rewind to the time of the page move, all links were guaranteed to be pointing at the old page and the other page didn't exist to link to. An automatic process to update all links to the page at the time the page was moved is safe with no need to look at context, no? Or is there an extra complication I'm missing? Binkyuk (talk) 17:32, 12 May 2009 (UTC)