Simon Willison’s Weblog

Tweaking Wikipedia

6th June 2005

Does anyone know why Wikipedia displays a redirected page at the same URL rather than using a proper HTTP redirect? Case in point: Topics in human-computer interaction actually displays the content from List of human-computer interaction topics (that’s my next exam topic)—the same content appears at two different URLs. Yuck. Here’s a Greasemonkey script to fix it: wikipedia-redirect.user.js.

While I’m at it, Wikipedia’s search function is painfully slow. Here’s another user script which changes their search button to search the site using Google instead. It also swaps the positions of the “Search” and “Go” buttons, and makes “Search” the default action for the form: wikipedia-googlesearch.user.js.