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Maniphest T58307

Don't use 302 redirect to handle wikidata.org/entity/Q12345
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Description

Currently, www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12345 will resolve to a 302 redirect to www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q12345 (which will then trigger a 303 to a specific rendering, based on content negotiation).

Instead of the 302, either of the following should be done:

  • Use an internal apache rewrite, with no HTTP redirect. This is the preferred solution (but for some reason caused problems when first tried).
  • Use a 303 ("see other") redirect instead of the 302. This is not quite as nice, but should be simple and already greatly improve the situation.

Some background:

/entity/Q12345 is the Linked Data interface of Wikidata, it is used as the canonical URI for a concept, which should forward to the URL of the description of the concept. A 302 redirect is semantically wrong here, and some semantic web / linked data tools complain about it.

Version: unspecified
Severity: normal

Details

Reference
bz56307

Event Timeline

• bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 22 2014, 2:17 AM
• bzimport added a project: Wikimedia-Apache-configuration.
• bzimport set Reference to bz56307.
• bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).
daniel created this task.Oct 29 2013, 10:31 AM
Dzahn added a comment.Oct 31 2013, 6:26 PM

the line in question is:

115 RewriteRule ^/entity/(.*)$ https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/$1 [R=302,QSA]

in main.conf in the repo operations/apache-config

as the simple solution we could just change that R=302 to R=303

Dzahn added a comment.Oct 31 2013, 7:54 PM

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/92925/1

ArielGlenn added a comment.Nov 6 2013, 9:20 AM

I understood that 302 was the fallback for non-HTTP 1.1 compatible clients that won't understand 303; how is it semantically wrong for them?

daniel added a comment.Nov 7 2013, 2:14 PM

(In reply to comment #3)

I understood that 302 was the fallback for non-HTTP 1.1 compatible clients
that won't understand 303; how is it semantically wrong for them?

We are currently sending a 302 followed by a 303. A client that doesn't understand 303 would already be unable to that.

In any case, this is for the http://www.wikidata.org/entity/ entry point - that's a URI schema explicitly designed for integration into the linked data web and geared towards clients that follow the respective rules and conventions.

While it's important to support legacy clients for reading HTML pages, I really don't see the point for a linked data URI interface.

Dzahn added a comment.Nov 26 2013, 11:07 PM

merged and deployed..

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/92925/

15:02 < mutante> !log deploying gerrit 92925 & 91124 (apache-config), makes /entity/ URLs on wikidata 303 and removes non-existent noncom wiki

lgtm

http://www.wikidata.org/entity/

http://www.wikidata.org/entity/foo

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