User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Technical Update: January 23, 2013/@comment-1318845-20130124062636/@comment-957747-20130124184129

This was a 'feature' released with MediaWiki 1.18 and was bugged initially. Here's the page of the bug report and thought process behind the change. Feel free to file a new bug with MediaWiki about why you feel it should still be a feature (makes sense when talking about redirects).