Author: steve
Description:
Go to http://wikipedia.org/index.html - note that you're not at the Wikipedia home page!
Background: If I enter the URL "https://en.wikipedia.org/zebra", or "https://wikipedia.org/zebra" or even "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/zebra" I get a 404 page that helpfully redirects me to the English language Zebra article after a 5 second pause. That's a nice touch. (although less so if you're a non-English speaker!)
However, it has an unintended consequence. If I go to Wikipedia's main page using https://wikipedia.org/index.html or https://wikipedia.org/index.htm or https://wikipedia.org/index.php - I get redirected to the technical article "Webserver directory index" (via the redirect "index.html" or whatever). This is not a useful behavior! For non-english speakers, it's a very bad thing!
I think most people would expect http://wikipedia.org/index.html to take them to the main page.
In case you doubt the depth of the problem, note that the "index.html" redirect comes up as a remarkably frequently-accessed page. In 2008 it was the 5th most visited page in the entire encyclopedia - with the only actual article to beat it being the one about the 2008 Olympic games! About 1.5 million hits per month go to the *articles* index.html, index.php and index.htm - which is an insanely unlikely number for a relatively obscure topic. That suggests that about 1.5% of the people trying to get to our home page (many of whom are non-English speakers) are winding up at this very obscure article about webserver directories instead of the home page!
IMHO, we should change that 404 page to treat "index.html", "index.php" and "index.htm" as special cases and redirect you to the main page (preferably without the 5 second delay) instead of this rather obscure article!
I think this should be a trivial check in whatever creates our 404 page - and will improve the Wikipedia experience for 1.5 million people every month. It should be fixed.
Version: wmf-deployment
Severity: enhancement