internetarchive
Show Wikipedia-style visible notification on pages when Redirect has occured
e.g.
When a redirect is mistakenly added (possibly due to an invalid merge, not exactly sure how it works here) it is difficult to realize and undo this change (at least for somebody else).
I had the problem that http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL13193A was a redirect to http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL575040A (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). I didn't do the merge/redirect, but having this author broken didn't seem acceptable to me.
So it took me a while to realize that this actually was a redirect, since on the search http://openlibrary.org/search/authors?q=Johann+Wolfgang+von+Goethe the first entry shows the right content in the summary, but the page I arrived at was quite unexpected and had nearly nothing to do with the result I clicked on.
What is missing in my eyes is a feature similar to how it works on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN leads to "International Standard Book Number", but it does say "(Redirected from ISBN)" at the top and when clicking on the "ISBN" link you can go to the original link (without being forwarded again) and make changes there.
Always arriving at http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL575040A I had no clue how to fix OL13193A, which was finally done in this edit
There is probably a trick to append a parameter to the url to stop forwarding and there is probably also an undo link for the original editor. That doesn't help the casual user that wants to fix things though.
I had a similar issue and I understand how they're undoable but it would be nice if there were a slightly simpler way to undo a problematic merge.
@jessamynwest @JonnyJD is this still an issue? I can't spot a problem with the links in the original description.
Assigning @hornc per slack discussions since he applied is tags
The bad redirect was fixed by the my revert https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL13193A/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe?b=24&a=23&_compare=Compare&m=diff
You can see the previous behavior by going to https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL13193A?v=23. I believe that the proposal that when you arrive at http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL575040A that there be some visual indication that you came via a redirect and have a way to to navigate back (probably to https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL13193A?m=history or something similar for us) is a good one, although perhaps not straightforward to implement for our chains of redirects since it'll go redirect->new->new with slug and by the time we've arrived at the page to be rendered, we may have lost the original URL.
Does anyone feel very strongly about this? This mostly Affects: Librarians. Maybe this should only show a message if someone is a librarian?
Yeah I think a message is necessary if you're going to address this but could be only for librarians if they are the only people who see it.
It sounds like a very useful, but not necessarily high priority, feature to me.
The whole goal of OpenLibrary is that, like Wikipedia, everyone is a librarian, right? That would imply that it should behave the same way for everyone.
I think Open Library has been trying to make it as easy as possible for anyone who wants to be a librarian to participate, but I don't think that on Wikipedia everyone is a librarian/editor -- the vast minority are. And being presented with information that may be confusing or subtract from what the patron is trying to accomplish may often not be what we want.
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/183#issuecomment-622201297
In the case of this feature request, I agree having some message visible on the page that a page has been redirected (e.g. adding ?redir_from=OL...X to the URL when a redirect occurs) is useful to librarians and possibly to all patrons (but I'm not convinced yet about the "all patrons" part).