Talk:Rust monsters

Plural redirects

So it appears redirects were created (by Paxed's bot) for every vanilla monster plural back in 2012. At the time, search didn't have autocomplete, so they had more utility. That being said:

• They're not hurting anything. Deleting them all would be a large undertaking (see below), and I really don't see any benefit to it. Server space and performance are not issues here.
• The general principle I'm thinking here is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". One might argue that the original creation of those redirects violated that principle - and going through now and creating plural redirects for every item or variant monster definitely would violate that principle. But now that the redirects are here, deleting them would also violate that principle.
• We'd have to make sure we aren't leaving behind redlinks for each redirect we delete: as it is right now, [[rust monsters]] vs [[rust monster]]s is a minor stylistic difference that only the six or seven active editors on this wiki would ever notice. By contrast, a redlink makes the article slightly broken to the (many more) readers of this wiki.
  • Checking "What links here" for (e.g.) gnomes reveals that it's used in five mainspace articles, so this isn't an academic issue - we'd have to check all those "What links here" pages manually. That's a lot of work.
• There are also a lot of annoying corner cases to deal with. Do we leave in plural redirects for cases where you can't use that Mediawiki feature, like [[dwarves]]? What do we do about flat-out irregular plurals, like djinn or mumakil, the latter coming from a fictional language? These are judgement calls that, in my opinion, it's just not worth the time to deal with.

Given all this, I'm not going to delete any of these redirects myself. In keeping with the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", I also won't object if some other admin decides to do it, but as I say, I don't think it's worth the effort. -Ion frigate (talk) 05:24, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

I didn't think this warranted such a thorough response, let alone to things I never remotely argued (given I said very little at all), but I suppose I may as well provide the perspective I actually hold:

• At the time I slapped on the deletion template, this particular redirect had only been used on two pages total - hardly a great amount of work to tend to, and work that I had taken care of just beforehand, leaving no red links to speak of.
• This is not some declaration of policy against any and all plural redirects - this is just a random user (AKA me) sticking a template on a singular page, going off a precedent that can be observed in the deletion log.
• Nor am I claiming any sense of urgency or ambiguous abstract """harm""" being done to the wiki: I just thought it was a redirect we didn't need that wasn't really used much anyway, and certainly didn't expect this level of pushback on what I expected to be a simple matter.

So if you weren't going to delete it yourself then... don't, that's fine? I don't mind it being discussed per se, but I really don't know where more than half of these presumptions even came from. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 09:55, 7 March 2023 (UTC)