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Introduce redirect log
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Description

Problem statement

Users want to know who wrote started the article they're currently viewing. The action=info page provided by MediaWiki uses the initial revision to attribute as the page creator, but this is not necessarily an "author" of the page, per se. Say the page began as a redirect then someone changed it into an article; action=info still points to the author of the original revision.

The page creation log and the revision history do not clearly indicate who actually started the article, and it is not cheap and/or accurate for tools to automate this (even going off of tags).

The most common need for this is with tools that list pages that a user started, for instance https://xtools.wmflabs.org/pages. A common complaint is that pages show up that weren't actually authored by the user (they created a redirect, and later someone else turned it into an article). In order to fix this, we need a quick historical reference to when this change was made and by whom.

Proposal

Log redirect changes. That is, the change to a redirect, or the change from it, noting the relevant revision ID and the performer.

I do not think action=info needs to pull in the last article-from-redirect change, but having a proper log in MediaWiki would at least allow for easy reference to redirect changes, and allow other tools to deduce who the original author is.

Related tasks

These tasks have stalled due to the lack of a redirect logging system:

Event Timeline

Changes of redirect are now tagged. Is that enough to treat this task as resolved?

Tags are mw-new-redirect and mw-removed-redirect (also exists: mw-changed-redirect-target)

Changes of redirect are now tagged. Is that enough to treat this task as resolved?

Tags are mw-new-redirect and mw-removed-redirect (also exists: mw-changed-redirect-target)

Very delayed reply, but the tags ended up working great for T190065: [Pages created] Check tags of deleted revisions to see if the former page was a redirect. I have attempted to do something similar for T182183: [Pages Created] Redirects are counted as "pages created" (which is one use-case that prompted this task), but I haven't perfected it yet. The issue is we need exclude revisions where a user was simply undoing vandalism, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/?diff=970560580. In the aforementioned example, the revision that was undone was not the previous revision, so it's not as simple as checking that revision for the mw-reverted tag. We still have to do some comparisons of rev_sha1 or something to ascertain that in fact a mw-removed-redirect is the start of an article. The issue becomes more cumbersome to solve if there was an edit war or other back-and-forth editing.

That said, I'm not sure a redirect log would make it any easier, either, but I'd like to identify some means for MediaWiki to deduce articles created from redirects. That maybe deserves a separate task. I can't speak for the others following this task if a redirect log would help their use cases, so leaving open for now.