Talk:Flywheels

WHY did you got out of your way to change the Battletrap (G1) link to Battletrap? It's VALID LINK. And it's a link that will REMAIN VALID WITHOUT CHANGING if there's ever another toy named Battletrap. Why did you make it less robust?

Explain. -Derik 22:29, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

The only things that linked to "Battletrap (G1)" were outdated pages (one of them To Be Deleted). With those outdated pages fixed (both of them), the redirect page was no longer necessary. That link should not be used, ever, until another Battletrap exists. --ItsWalky 22:32, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I see you've never programmed and don't know how.

Tell me, do you have any concept of the logistical headache this short-sighted policy will create in the long run? Shot doesn't flow uphill, why do youw ant your editors to work harder to achive the same net result? The end result will just be links that got unchanged when formerly un-diambig'd articles go disambiged, essentially becoming 'broken' insofar that they no longer link to the article they're supposed to. -Derik 22:39, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Preparing for every contingency takes way more time than fixing only what's wrong later. --ItsWalky 22:52, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

And yet, it's MY time. And it works perfectly well with anyone else who wants to make 'dumb' links. And you're spending YOUR time undoign the work of MY time... so that in the future if there is ever another Flywheeels, you can again spend YOUR time redoing what I did, which you undid.

And if you'll forgive me for saying so- I can't necessarily remember off the top of my head if there's been another character with the name Battletrap, Wheeljack, Commetor, Slingshot, Fireblast or Fungitron. "Shit, did Hasbro ever re-use the name Mainframe?" I can either take the time to look it up for every link I make, or I can just link to Mainframe (G1) and know it's right. Not only is it right- but it'll STAY right if Hasvbro ever does rename that most-generic-of-names.

But not if you keep deleting redirects. -Derik 23:06, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Researching your links as you write an article should be required. That's a given for every single link I will ever make in any article I ever write, regardless of whether it's Transformers or not. If I'm writing something on Wikipedia, I will certainly have to look up to see how to link to "White" if I'm linking the color. It's part of the process. I mean, there's at least an album, probably some things I've never heard of. But I'm pretty darn sure Wikipedia doesn't "(blah)" every single darn article name link just in case someone creates something new with an old name.

The thing is, your method still doesn't keep us from having to fix links as new things are created. What if there ends up being more than one G1 Mainframe? (Hell, there is already, if you count the G.I. Joe as G1.) Then you still have to recreate all those links. So forget about it. Please.

(You will note we already had this discussion months ago, when the Wiki As A Whole decided to move to this system. This discussion is redundant.)

--ItsWalky 23:50, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to nip this "I see you've never programmed" thing right in the bud; I'm a programmer and one of the things you quickly learn is that's completely wrong. There are a variety of reasons why you don't do this, most of which have already been covered in some way or another, but it's really worth pointing out how absurd bringing that up is. You do not ever program something that's currently useless but will do something in the future; you implement things either they come up, or development progresses. Putting in backdoors in anticipation of something that will happen in the future is TERRIBLE design philosophy, plain and simple. --Suki Brits 23:38, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

*grumble* -Derik 02:03, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm a little confused, Derik, by your seemingly sudden passion for this issue. Like the others said above, we discussed this months ago and decided to drop the suffixes that existed on every character article. Creating a redirect with a suffix for every character article just re-opens all the problems that existed when we were putting the articles in those spaces (as opposed to redirects). Go re-read archives 2 and 3 of the community portal talk page. When a name that was never re-used before gets its first re-use and we need to fix links for it... it's not hard to do. In most cases there will only be a few links to the character page anyway. There are bots written by Wikipedia users that can do this sort of fix automatically, too, so it doesn't even have to involve work for we human editors. --Steve-o 04:03, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

*grumble* I suppose I should finally put the community portal on watch. I've been grimly hoping to avoid that level fo involvement int he boring meta-discussion and proceed by simply doing what's sensible with people flagging me when something new came down.

But if we're going to choose stupidity, I suppose it's my duty to resist it at the discussion stage. :p -Derik 18:54, 5 February 2007 (UTC)