The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more redirects. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the redirect's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The words "Militant organization" are not used in the list. A militant organization may or may not be a terrorist organization. Our article on the word militant, Militant (word), says: "Militance may or may not include physical violence, armed combat, terrorism, and the like." It also goes on to say: "The New York Times ran an article titled Militant Environmentalists Planning Summer Protests to Save Redwoods describing a group that believes in "confrontational demonstrations" and "nonviolent tactics" to get across their message of preserving the environment." This says that the militant environmental group was non-violent which would mean they are not terrorist. It does say: "Militant is sometimes used as a euphemism for terrorist or armed insurgent." but this is not enough to redirect the phrase to List of designated terrorist organizations. GBfan 23:22, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.
The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more redirects. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the redirect's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was delete. WJBscribe(talk) 11:52, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Following up on Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2013 November 20 and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive257#Mass creation of very improbable redirects, I am nominating all not already deleted redirects listed at User:Vanisaac/test/4. It has become clear (at least to most editors involved) that the huge number of pageviews these redirects get are not from humans, but are caused by bots or by errors in the pageviewcounts. These redirects serve no purpose, and considering that there are at least 730 of those (plus those already deleted, plus perhaps some other ones not in that list) and more are created each week, it makes sense to ut a stop to these and delete them. Further creations can possibly be speedy deleted as "implausible recent redirects", but a more formal discussion for such an amount of redirects seemed sensible. This discussion is only about the redirects with an additional "m" or "n" at the end, not about any of the other groups discussed at that AN discussion. Fram (talk) 12:18, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all. Maintaining nonsense like this damages Wikipedia's credibility. bd2412T 14:04, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Delete all, useless redirects; implausible search terms. I took the liberty of collapsing the list for readability. Resolute 14:29, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep all for now, but implant technical fix, then delete all: per VanIsaac's statment:"Take a look at the stats pages: this is not some errant bot pinging the site over and over: these page requests show the unmistakable sign of human behavior: a big initial jump and slow trail-off - I've even noticed a double spike, where the link is obviously posted a second time somewhere else. These are links getting posted somewhere, with real, actual people trying to access these pages. Now I don't know why they are getting mangled, or where they are coming from, but my back-of-the-hand calculation puts these new redirects as serving about half a million page requests per week." I relise that there's other statistical arguments that tease aren't actual people, until we really know if these are actual people, we should assume these are per the precautionary principle. If we incorrectly conclude that these aren't actual people, then we have (as VanIsaac said) "hundreds of thousands of people per week were following a link to Wikipedia, only to find an incoherent error page instead of the intended content".
As for the fix, take a look at Index set (recursion theory (notice the missing end pren), its no such article page shows a "Did you mean: Index set (recursion theory)". Implement the same fix for these m/n searches so that Opera (web browser)m (for example) will show a "Did you mean: Opera (web browser)". This way the malformed links will work without us creating all these redirects, but we still have the no such article page to indicate to whoever is creating these links that he needs to fix his software. This will permanently prevent any such m/n issues from coming up again; sense this bug showed up in at least one peace of external software, it might show up in others. After the technical fix delete these to show the no such article page. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 16:35, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If I had some good idea about where these are coming from, and that these weren't real people following these links, I would put a G7 CSD on them myself. I've yet to see that. There is nothing that would make me happier than to be able to nuke all of these guys, but if there's reason to believe that this is actually a million legitimate page requests each week, I'm going to be gun shy on that. VanIsaacWSVexcontribs 18:23, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's basically my point, until we know that these aren't real people following these links, we should assume these are real people. My technical fix will allow us to nuke all of these redirects. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 18:59, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I sent Diederik van Liere of the WMF analytics team an e-mail about the WP:AN discussion, and he wrote back to say he'll comment there. Obviously the heavy traffic, which began around 1 November, is not due to a general increase in people making typos, but to software. However, every person coming to the site is doing so through software, and all software (one hopes) is acting on some person's behalf. Due to the privacy policy, the general public can't see the IP addresses, user agent strings, and exact times of page requests. I'm assuming the WMF analytics people have access to that information. However, the WMF provides hourly logs of the number of requests for each page (and the number of bytes served).
I looked at Seneca_Falls_Conventionn because the double "n" seemed like it could be somewhat plausible as a typo. However, stats.grok.se shows it as normally receiving zero views in a month. I noticed the traffic was highest on 18 November 2013. I downloaded the page view logs for 18 November, grepped for the normal and spurious traffic, and made a graph. I note a gross correspondence between the two curves: they rise and fall at roughly the same times, by roughly the same amounts. These rises and falls are often due to people's daily habits. Bots and spiders often run continuously. I only looked at a tiny part of the available data, but what I see points to a connection between the spurious traffic and normal traffic. —rybec 23:24, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: There may well be a link to human pageviews, but I would consider it a lot more likely that these are miscounts by the software. It seems hard to believe that thousands and thousands of people every week ended (and end) at the wrong page, and no one has complained about this, or made the redirect. Not a single one (as far as I know). A significant group have now been deleted again for a week, and again no one seems to have noticed this. I can't believe that hundreds of thousands of people had this problem, and none of them did anything about it.Fram (talk) 14:37, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The page-view logs come with a disclaimer that the counts "are not unique visits." Apart from the redirects created by Vanisaac (talk·contribs), I don't have an example of a redirect created because of this odd traffic. Supposing for a moment that it does come from people, are they really likely to complain or make a redirect upon finding themselves at something like the Thanksgiving_dinnerm non-page? I suspect that most would notice the extraneous "m" and quietly navigate to the article by searching or by editing the URL. It's also possible that these errors may be happening in a context where people would be unusually disinclined to edit Wikipedia or complain. For example, the Clementine audio player can retrieve Wikipedia articles about musicians.
If these are indeed miscounts by the software, and not actual requests at all, then no bandwidth is being wasted by the presence of these redirects (because if that's true, the linked articles aren't being sent out by the servers). As I understand it, a redirect which has never been a full-fledged article takes up very little storage space--probably no more than the space taken up by this discussion.
I found more examples of correlation between the peculiar traffic and and normal traffic. Note how these three all have peaks on the 14th and 24th of November: [1][2][3]. Also these graphs, from 12 November on, have a rough resemblance to each other: [4][5] (but the somewhat plausible typo of an appended "n" shows only 5 hits [6]).
This mysterious traffic (if it is traffic) has only been happening since last month; perhaps whoever's causing it will notice it is erroneous and stop. If this persists, and some editor(s) feel that it's a constructive use of time to create hundreds—or a few thousands—of redirects to satisfy the requests, so what? The WMF, which pays for the bandwidth, has the information to determine where this traffic is coming from, and has been alerted to this phenomenon. If it's coming from one place and is causing significant harm, their staff can easily null route it. —rybec 18:23, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Several of these were created before I came around, but were removed. You can check the list from three weeks ago, and pretty much any of the redlinks will be now-deleted redirects created by others. VanIsaacWSVexcontribs 18:55, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all unless some technical reason found that is beneficial to have them. I'm reasonably sure these views are from automation, also likely it's automation within Wiki. The exact source still seems a mystery. Regards, Sun Creator(talk) 20:55, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep all. A really weird situation, but these redirects aren't hurting anything, and Holiday (2014 film)m clearly isn't anything except an error for Holiday (2014 film). Anyone following one of these links will end up at the pages they intended to find; it's not like we're confusing people, wasting disk space, or making it hard to reach correct pages. Nyttend backup (talk) 21:42, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all. Wikipedia really should not cater to whatever is causing these titles with "m" at the end of them to be looked up so frequently. Unless some specific technical reasoning about what is searching these titles can be presented during the course of this discussion, I do not see the reasoning for these redirects to exist, especially considering that most, if not all, of the redirects in the list are very unlikely misspellings. Steel1943 (talk) 16:39, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all and direct that no further ones be created with the trailing "m" or "n". It's confusing to see them when entering an article name in the Wikipedia search box, and it's clearly an automation bug of some sort causing the hits that shouldn't be supported by adding the redirects. The precedent at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2013 November 20#Opera(web browser)m is a good one. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:43, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.
The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more redirects. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the redirect's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was keep. Trout to Red Slash, however, for making this change unilaterally, and removing the RfD tag in the process. --BDD (talk) 01:41, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
disambiguate It is not obvious why this should redirect to firefighter instead of women in firefighting, which is more specifically concerned with women firefighters. And the merged disambiguation page at fireman (disambiguation) is rather horridly conflating the terms "fireman" and "firewoman", by making the male term the primary term, gives the appearance of sexism in the creation of disambiguation pages where the female term is spelled mostly differently. 70.50.148.105 (talk) 11:14, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Retarget to firefighter; the primary target of both fireman and firewoman is the occupation itself; sexism arises where one is treated differently than the other because of the difference in sex (fireman does not point to an article on Men in firefighting). bd2412T 13:58, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
AGREE "Firewoman" is not a term used rarely, if at all in the fire service. When the profession was 100% male dominated, the understood identifier was "fireman". Now "firefighter" is used as a replacement. --WikiTryHardDieHard (talk) 16:47, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Target should be firefighter. Edits by different people, including the nominator just a few minutes before the nomination was created, make me unsure what "keep" and "retarget" really mean right now. Since "firewoman" is used to refer to a female firefighter, it should be treated just like "fireman", which is a redirect to firefighter. Nyttend (talk) 15:17, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.
