No, the point I was making is that the article alphabetizer thing (I don't know what its official name is) is all messed up. Ideally, you should be able to start at whatever article is alphabetically first and go through every single article on the site. But you can't do that because some of the articles don't link in the proper sequence, and in the one case I illustrated, one of the redirect pages causes a loop in the sequence.

Funkychinaman makes a decent point. I figured they were all related, but apparently they aren't, so naturally I'd think we'd do seperate pages for them all, with maybe a see also: section for the rest of then, since they are relative to one another in that they were service guns during the same period, but not mecanically compatible or designed similarly.

As far as the S&W classic automatics go, if you're going to consolidate them, there should be a page for the 39 series, the 59 Series, the 69 series, and the 45 series. Those are the simplest categories, and all of the guns are more or less descended from all of those. For example, separating the 59 from the 459 from the 659 from the 5904 from the 5906 is kinda eh to me, since, apart from some minor changes, they are all just about the same gun.

that is because people will still type in "Smith & Wesson Escort" without realizing that the actual model number is the 61. If they do, they will still end up at the RIGHT PAGE. Those who type in Smith & Wesson 61 Escort will get the correct page. Re-directs don't count because they are not in the actual GUN DIRECTORY. They won't show up in the listing of all GUN pages. They just show up in the rotation (which people should NOT be using to find a gun anyway).

The problem in the past is that people have split apart pages and did a crap job of fleshing out the page. IF there is a large number of people who hold a 'misconception' that they are related, then you are obliged to write some sort of coherent introduction for the gun page to EXPLAIN why this is so. For one, tons of people put PPSh-41s and PPS-43s in the same lineage. So much so that tons of folks for years erroneously called them PPSH-43s (myself included).

As for the S&W pages, it's all about people finding the right gun when they are looking for it. No one intuitively knows that a certain line of guns are just improvements of the previous models. WE KNOW that because we've been researching it. But the lay public doesn't. We are working against IMFDB's craptacularly BAD search function. It doesn't do fuzzy searches like IMDB does. So remember that a gun can't be un-findable to the general public when you think long term about doing a massive reformat.

At the first part, I agree that it needs to be done right, so let him do it right, and if he doesn't do it right, revert it all back, or have someone do it correctly. At the end of the day, the change should still be done if we're going to be continuous with a certain format of keeping like guns together and unlike guns apart (the definition of "like" being guns that are clones or mechanical descendants or something like that), kind of like the M16 and 1911 pages.

As for the S&W pages, yes, finding the gun is the most important thing, but that just means we need to do proper redirect pages after they have been combined. We do this on the M16 page, the 1911 page and the Beretta 92 page, to name a few, so why should the S&W Automatics, which all share mechanical lineage with a few original pistols, be split up?

Then why do we have it?