Suggestion: Make it so the tag labels in the “Related entries” section of an entry automatically update when someone changes the name of a tag.
I just changed the tag “Global dystopia” to be called just “Dystopia”, then realised that the old tag label would still be included as a “Related entry” for at least one other entry. I can change this manually, but that takes up some time and requires that I know which other entries mention that entry in the “Related entry” section (or that I do some sort of search to find them, which would take more time). So it’d be nice if it just automatically updated.
On the other hand, I don’t think it’d be good to automatically update all places where the tag label is used and linked to the tag, since many of those places might be within sentences where a new label won’t work quite right. And I’m not sure how you could handle the technical aspects of updated only the mentions in “Related entries” sections. So maybe this is too hard to do to be worthwhile—not sure.
There is already a (clunky) feature that enables this.
If you hyperlink text with a tag url with the url parameter ?userTagName=true, the hyperlinked text will be replaced by whatever the current name of the tag is.
E.g. If the tag is called “Global dystopia” and I put in a post or other tag with the hyperlink url /global-distoptia?useTagName=true and then it gets renamed to “Dystopia”:
The old URL will still work
The text “Global dystopia” will be replaced with the current name “Dystopia”
manual changes to the name (as opposed to the URL) of the links to the article, as needed.
So on the technical side, we ideally would want (1) redirects to be automatically created whenever the name (and hence associated URL) of an article changes, and (2) a “what links here” feature so that an exhaustive list of articles linking to the article whose name has changed can be generated, to facilitate the introduction of the required manual changes.
I’ll reach out to the tech team and see what they think about this.
Suggestion: Make it so the tag labels in the “Related entries” section of an entry automatically update when someone changes the name of a tag.
I just changed the tag “Global dystopia” to be called just “Dystopia”, then realised that the old tag label would still be included as a “Related entry” for at least one other entry. I can change this manually, but that takes up some time and requires that I know which other entries mention that entry in the “Related entry” section (or that I do some sort of search to find them, which would take more time). So it’d be nice if it just automatically updated.
On the other hand, I don’t think it’d be good to automatically update all places where the tag label is used and linked to the tag, since many of those places might be within sentences where a new label won’t work quite right. And I’m not sure how you could handle the technical aspects of updated only the mentions in “Related entries” sections. So maybe this is too hard to do to be worthwhile—not sure.
There is already a (clunky) feature that enables this.
If you hyperlink text with a tag url with the url parameter
?userTagName=true, the hyperlinked text will be replaced by whatever the current name of the tag is.E.g. If the tag is called “Global dystopia” and I put in a post or other tag with the hyperlink url
/global-distoptia?useTagName=trueand then it gets renamed to “Dystopia”:The old URL will still work
The text “Global dystopia” will be replaced with the current name “Dystopia”
See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E6CF8JCQAWqqhg7ZA/wiki-tag-faq#What_are_the_secret_fancy_URL_parameters_for_linking_to_tags_
The way Wikipedia solves this is by
automatic redirects from the old to the new URL.
manual changes to the name (as opposed to the URL) of the links to the article, as needed.
So on the technical side, we ideally would want (1) redirects to be automatically created whenever the name (and hence associated URL) of an article changes, and (2) a “what links here” feature so that an exhaustive list of articles linking to the article whose name has changed can be generated, to facilitate the introduction of the required manual changes.
I’ll reach out to the tech team and see what they think about this.
I actually think redirects are already being automatically created, though I’m not sure.
Correct.