REDIRECT

Shirayuki (talk)01:48, 16 August 2020

It is possible to change it for magic keywords, but with consensus from major wikis in that language (I suppose it is mostly used in Chechen Wikipedia, but consult as well any existing users in Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikinews or Wikiquotes if they have projects (including possible beta projects in Incubator).

In all cases, preserve the English term as one of the valid (and reserved) alias. You certainly don't want to break many redirecting pages or force all the wiki to be reindexed for something that is purely technical and invisible in rendered pages, only visible in the wikieditor; and as well wikieditors must be updated, including bots like Pywikimedia to reflect the change: many bots won't stop immediately and won't update as soon as you make the change, and not all your wiki editors may be aware of that change even if it is announced on some pages or talk spaces where it will be visible for a short time after various other topics).

Even for very common namespaces like "Template:" or "Image:" or "File:" or "Category:", these are kept as permanent aliases even if they may be translated (unlike the "#REDIRECT" magic keywords, the namespaces are made visible in the UI at top of pages as a preferred title). so every change on these must be performed by small steps while preserving the compatibility (and it's not really needed to make tons of edits for these common keywords, it just disturbs all users with many notifications or mail sent for such massive edits without any other more meaningful changes: this can be changed incrementally later by manual edits; bots may be used only if a measurement is taken first to see if this concerns pages that are difficult to find). And even before editing pages, the first fixes to apply will be to templates generating these tokens and transcluding them (but be careful before changing that on a template, you must have tested it in non-transcluded pages to see that this works and see if existing wikieditors are correctly handling the situation on these few pages: be aware that the initial talk to put this change may be rapidly reverted if too many users complain : you'll need to use pedagogy and prepare some help page to summarize the argument and what may be changed and what may be delayed).

Verdy p (talk)17:56, 12 September 2020