[Developers] /wikipedia/en_id not giving results for redirected ids

[Shug Boabby]

Hi all,

The following query will return the Freebase GUID for a Wikipedia
article with the given WPID (this corresponds to the "Spock" page).

{
  "guid" : null,
  "key" : {
    "namespace" : "/wikipedia/en_id",
    "value" : "53571"
  }
}

However, the following returns null (this ID corresponds to the
"Mr_Spock" page, which redirects to "Spock").

{
  "guid" : null,
  "key" : {
    "namespace" : "/wikipedia/en_id",
    "value" : "3462975"
  }
}

Why does this happen? How do I fix it?

I was expecting Freebase to return the GUID of the article that it
redirects to. Is there another way to achieve what I want? I don't
seem to be able to get *any* information for the redirected page...
this is quite concerning.

Consider the following (highly likely) series of events:-

- I obtain the wpid for an article and persist it to disc
- several days/weeks/months later, that record is pulled up and
freebase is queried
- the wpid is no longer a "primary" id, it is now a redirect and
therefore all Freebase API queries fail against it, and I have no way
to update the wpid

That seems pretty broken to me. How do I protect against this?

I had thought I could use the Freebase API to do Wikipedia ID
resolution with something like:-

{
  "a:key" : {
    "namespace" : "/wikipedia/en_id",
    "value" : "3462975"
  },
  "b:key" : {
    "namespace" : "/wikipedia/en_id",
    "value" : null
  }
}

but this is not going to work if the redirected articles are not
present on Freebase.