Wikipedia talk:Redirect/Archive 1

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Ortolan88's suggestions

I'd like to suggest a rework of this page. At present, it is just the mechanics of a simple redirect.

Several other points I think need covering:

Redirecting so that common synonyms will all end up at the same place, [[FBI]] and [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]]
Redirecting to one article after consolidation two closely related articles and the idea of cleaning up by fixing the links to the article that is now a redirect.
Distinguishing between a redirect and a move.

Also, I don't understand the Larrys Page example at all.

Comments? Ortolan88

Did a little; take a look and feel free to improve it. --Brion 06:27 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

Excellent! Tweaked one point. Ortolan88

template on the same line

I think it needs to be mentioned somewhere in the documentation that the template message needs to be on the same line as the #REDIRECT tag. The server seems to just reject it if it's on a separate line, and it literally took me several minutes to figure out why the messages weren't showing up on my redirects... --Codeman38 06:21, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

inter-wiki redirects

Latest comment: 18 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

User:Mac asked how to remove inter-wiki redirects from wiktionary to wikipedia. Answer now in article under Inter-wiki redirects.
Where is this Inter-wiki redirects article? I can't find it. —Brim 06:16, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Deletion of misspelled redirects

Should misspelled redirects be deleted or kept?

I strongly disagree with the present consensus of creating redirects because they are misspelled, for example, "Hetrosexual" redirecting to "Heterosexual". Sure, this practise helps users who can't spell find what they are looking for quicker, but it also discredits the Wikipedia as a serious medium because it sends out the message that we condone inaccuracy and bad English. In my opinion we should aim for no less than being the best encyclopedia in the world, and surely accuracy is a word that must come at the very top of the list of an encyclopedia's missions. Also, there is currently no clear distinction between a correct alternative spelling and a common incorrect spelling in redirects. Who agrees? Klafubra 17:01, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I strongly agree with Klafubra. I understand why there is a need for them in some cases, but surely not for mis-spellings! On the "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." page, there should also be a suggestion that the user checks their spelling. Bobbis 01:42, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Titling redirect destinations

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump

It just occurred to my that it would be nice if an article retitled itself when it was reached via a redirect or a piped link. For instance if the pipe was National Covenant, then the article would be titled National Covenant when you reached it via that link. The text would still be the text of the Covenanter article though. I think that this would reduce users surprise when they click on a link saying Estate car but end up redirected at an article titled Station wagon. After all in some cases they may not be aware that the two refer to the same thing. What does everyone else think ? -- Derek Ross 04:05 Apr 21, 2003 (UTC)

I don't think so. I think it would be too confusing if the person is reading an article entitled, say, Crust, and wondering why the article seems to be about Earth in general. Your scheme would be fine for synonyms, but when the two titles are about different things, I think it would be too confusing. -- Tim Starling 07:35 Apr 21, 2003 (UTC)

Also, redirects are sometimes corrections - a common usage being redirected to the proper term. The corrected title serves to inform the user. Cgs

Yes, sometimes the same thing is refered by a totally different name. The article should state how it is called so for example, Station wagon should state it is also called Estate car too, prefereablly in where, which country. Anyway, we don't have to put a modification to the system. -- Taku 17:51 Apr 21, 2003 (UTC)

We could distinguish between the various types of redirect, so the text for airplane would read:

#SYNONYM-OF aeroplane

This would be particularly good for differences in UK/US/... spelling Martin

rolling back a move

help! i dove into where i shouldn't have dove. i thought it would be easy to change September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack to September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks....but there are toooooo many other pages that are effected, and I want to switch them back. Could someone do me a favor and ROLL BACK everything i did from 22:10 17 May 2003 until 22:25 17 May 2003....i would be much obliged. Kingturtle 22:48 17 May 2003 (UTC)

Man, I sure learned that lesson the hard way. Once something gets named it gets so entrenched into wikipedia that changing an article title can be a real nightmare. And changing it back is the best thing to do. Turns out, the ROLL BACK feature doesn't work for MOVING BACK articles to original names. alas. I think I put everything back where it was before I made my attempts. sigh. I was sweating like a pig about it. Kingturtle 00:16 18 May 2003 (UTC)

Can I say "I told you so" now, or would that not be an appropriate expression of WikiLove? ;-) Martin

I thought you could just create a new page called "...attacks," move all the source code into it, and turn the old page into a redirect. Smack

I thought so too...but there are also:

You don't have to change all the links; that's why we have redirects. Moving a page automatically creates a redirect from the old title to the new title, so anyone following a link to the old title is automatically brought to the new one. The one thing you do have to do is make sure that any redirects to the old title are updated, since the wiki refuses to automatically forward a chain of redirects in order to avoid potential infinite loops. You can find the redirect pages from the "what links here" list: September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, September 11 Terrorist Attack, September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, September 11 terrorist attack, September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, September 11th, Nine-eleven, Nine eleven, 9/11, September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Bush September 14, 2001 speech, Michael Carroll, Peter Carroll, September 11, 2001, 9-11, September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks. Yeah, it's a few, but it's not a gajillion, and it's not too hard to find where the links are in them. :) --Brion 10:37 18 May 2003 (UTC)

This has been mentioned several times before: The current way redirects work is ugly and that is why people prefer direct links. The way things are now, "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." is replaced by a "redirected from" statement. This just screams to the user, "the method you have used to access this page is deprecated." Few people took issue with redirects in Phase II - it might have been due to the fact that the redirect statement was higher up on the page then. --mav 10:45 18 May 2003 (UTC)

Meta-Wikipedia redirect to Wikipedia

Smack had problems with an inter-wiki redirect from his meta page to his wikipedia page, and couldn't figure out how to undo it. Answer in help page under inter-wiki redirects

Edit redirect page

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Thursday, June 12th, 02003.

Everytime I attempt to edit the page List of organic gardening and farming topics, which is currently a redirect page, I'm taken to the edit screen for Organic gardening, which is the page it currently redirects to. I want to change List of organic gardening and farming topics to a 'list' page, splitting it from the Organic gardening article, and also cross linking to Organic farming as it will be relevant to both pages. However at present I don't seem able to do this. Can anybody advise? Is it something to do with having moved the page a couple of times? quercus robur 11:51 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Does this link work for you? -- Notheruser 11:53 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hi Notheruser- the problem seemed to sort itself out by itself- thanks anyway quercus robur 15:20 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

e-business

From Wikipedia:Reference desk:

The topic e-business is redirected to electronic commerce. I am writing a separate article about electronic business because I think it is something different. Can someone change the redirection of e-business to electronic business? TIA Rudolph 9:25 10 juli 2003 (CET)

It's not hard to do: when you click on a link to e-business, it takes you to electronic commerce, but with a link near the top saying "redirected from E-business." Click on that link, and you will be taken to the redirect page, which you can edit. BTW this question should have been asked on Wikipedia:Village pump, and it will probably be moved there shortly. -- Tim Starling 07:48 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)

inbound redirects

"Normally, we try to make sure that all "inbound redirects" are mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs of the article, and they are bolded."

Is this true? I thought it was only if the terms were synonyms. Of course, there are countless examples of titles of redirects that shouldn't be mentioned in articles: "philisophy" shouldn't be mentioned in philosophy, all the variations on the phrase "September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack" shouldn't be mentioned in September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack, and so on... But what about other cases? Should "Gnasher" be bolded in Dennis the Menace (UK)? I don't really see why he should. Is there a definite policy on this? Wikipedia:Follow highlighting conventions says to "[f]ollow our established conventions for highlighting and linking", but doesn't specify all of them or link to a page which does. -- Oliver P. 08:40 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I think you're probably right, but likewise I'm unsure... Martin

Redirect as Wiklinks & readability

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump

Whenever we encounter a redirect Wikilink, we should (but don't have to) change it to say, [[rectangle|rectangular]] instead of [[rectangular]]? (Such as here)

Doesn't indirect-direct ([[rectangle|rectangular]]) impede readability for (copy)editors?

--Menchi 20:49 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It's also bad for sub-topic redirects - when we finally get an article on the sub-topic, we have to manually fix all the old links.

There are some benefits to [[rectangle|rectangular]], but they're (arguably) the result of imperfect software, rather than being fundamental. Martin

This seems to be similar to my question, so I'll ask it here (hope it's not too dumb). On the main [[Redirect]] page, one of the reasons for redirects is given as "Aiding writing: planet Mars redirects to Mars (planet)". But I notice a lot of time is spent by people changing the common writing in a text (which redirects) to the title of the main article. For example, when [[Canadian]] (which redirects to Canada) is changed to [[Canada|Canadian]]. That appears to be a lot of work for no obvious reason. Which is considered best or preferable? Thanks. Rlvaughn 18:59, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I looked around for an answer to this, so I hope I didn't miss it somewhere...my question is about redirects. Is it more of a policy to create redirects for various possible spellings/terms, or is it better to just find all the links and fix them so they go to the right place? Usually I do the latter, but then it seems half the stuff on recent changes is people making redirects, so I don't know. Adam Bishop 18:47 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't think people usually aim to create redirects on purpose. What happens is that they move a page to a more appropriate name, which automatically creates a redirect. When redirects are created (automatically or on purpose, the links should still be fixed. Angela 19:03 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I do create them on purpose. Mandarin Chinese has several Romanizations still in use, despite the slow taking over by Pinyin. --Menchi 19:07 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

"Fix" them if they are misspelling or typo. Otherwise, it's fine. Leave uniformity to the bot, if WP ever decides that all "Governor General" should be "Governor-General". Many people have the habit of typing alternative and correct variant due to habit or convenience. --Menchi 19:07 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

If I see a red link, and I know that an article exists on the topic under a different name, I create a redirect. Almost always. If the red link is the result of a typo, then I create a redirect and fix the typo.

Wikipedia is so large that we can't expect people to remember the "correct" name for every single article - redirects are our solution to that problem, and should be used with abandon. Martin 19:37 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Some of us have good memories ;-) -- Tarquin 20:28 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Question re text in a REdirect Page disappearing

In a redirect page, I edited the page to put some explanation of why I created the redirect page, after the redirection "Command". Naturally, I expected this would not normally be shown, as the redirect in action means that page is not shown. And, that is what happened.
But, if people click on the ""Redirected From"" info in the target page, they can come back to the redirection page. But the text/explanation I put in is not apparent. Yet it was when I did the Preview of the page.
So, what happened to the text I entered ?? How can I get that explantory text to show, if people want to uderstand why a redirect page exists ? Or, should I put the explanation in a Talk: page for the Redirect Page. Seems a bit more complicated, unnecessarily so.
Can we have some explanation of this on this page, please.RB-Ex-MrPolo 10:38, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

What article are you referring to? I'd like to see this... Martin 10:58, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

your version of delete looks fine - the current version looks like it's had the explanation text removed. Does this explain things? :) Martin 11:15, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Apparently, as I mentioned in a comment at the top of the page, the server just strips explanatory text if it's not on the same line as the #REDIRECT tag! This one ended up biting me as well; it took me several minutes to figure out why the explanatory text I added kept getting rejected, until I just happened to make the observation that there was no new line before the explanation in the examples I had looked at... --Codeman38 06:26, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Disputed text

When adding new redirect pages, try to keep the number of redirects to any one article to a reasonable number, those needed to cover common searches, meet user expectations, and particularly common misspellings (not every possible misspelling or permutation of a name, that's why there is a search engine).

I added a para on the key problem with lots of redirects - cluttering searches. People should bear this in mind, obviously.

beyond the search engine, why do redirects need to be kept to a "reasonable" number? I want to exceed user expectations - that's the mission statement of any sensible customer-focused group, and it's a good aim.

Besides, the search engine uses up too many database cycles, so encouraging people to use the search engine will make Wikipedia slower and less reliable. Martin 11:14, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

deletion conditions

A redirect should be deleted when one or more of the following conditions is met:

the number of redirect pages for an article is unreasonably high making it difficult for users to locate similarly named articles
the redirect has been added by a self-interested party for the apparent purpose of advertizing, self-aggrandizment, or fanaticism
the redirect is offensive and not useful (such as "Joe Bloggs is a Loser" to "Joe Bloggs"), however, redirects which are meaningful due to common real-world usage (such as Dubya or Chemical Ali) should not be deleted (even if highly offensive)

I had summarised this down to "if [the redirect] is offensive and not useful, if it is unreasonably cluttering the search results, or if it has been added for the purposes of advertising or self-aggrandisement."

I think my version is rather more concise, but still says everything that needs to be said. I wonder if Daniel missed my version, or considers it inferior? Martin

I restored the text (and incidentally tweaked/trimmed it a bit) on the Wikipedia:Redirect page for a few reasons:

Wikipedia:Deletion policy says to go to Wikipedia:Redirect for more details on which redirects should be deleted, but there weren't really any details, so I added them back and I think they're helpful, especially for new editors.
The summary leaves out several things: the detail of "fanaticism" which I think is important, basically, that there are other selfish reasons inappropriate redirects get added, and also offensive links

I think the enumerated version is better (for this page, not the deletion policy page), actually. Breaking out the three different situtions when redirects are not appropriate and are valid deletions: excessive number (explain what and why), selfish reasons (explain that too), and offensive (and distinguish between offensive okay and offensive not-okay). Daniel Quinlan 12:48, Jul 31, 2003 (UTC)

Regards "selfish reasons" - does it matter why someone added a redirect - if it doesn't get in the way of searching for other topics, and if it's useful in some way, then why not keep it? Suppose a Blizzard employee added the redirect from Starcraft to StarCraft - would you advocate deleting it? Martin

There may be a gray area, but let's define it. (1) If the Starcraft redirect is really needed, why not let a non-Blizzard employee add it? (2) My thinking behind "selfish" is that redirects (and articles too, by the way), do not belong in wikipedia when the downside is greater than the upside -- when does that happen? Sometimes due to bad judgement, but more often due to selfish thinking. Daniel Quinlan 01:23, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps it would make more sense to say that "promotional" redirects deserve extra scrutiny, but not that they should be deleted? Martin 08:29, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Well, why not just delete them? I'm a bit perplexed about your reasoning, here. I didn't say "must", I said "should". I'd be okay with "should generally" if you want to leave a bit more wiggle room. Daniel Quinlan 06:46, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)

Well, in the example I gave of Starcraft, the upside is greater than the downside. But you, it seems, would rather make Wikipedia a worse encyclopedia, merely because of the identity of the person who created the redirect.

This seems simple enough to me. After all, our purpose here is to build an encyclopedia, not to punish selfishness. If sometimes we can use "selfish" acts in order to build a better encyclopedia, is that not a wondrous thing? Martin

I'm not out to punish selfishness. I don't propose banning any user who write autobiographical content, for example. I just don't want us to reward it by allowing people to litter Wikipedia with self-promotion. I don't want Wikipedia to become the encyclopedia known for attracting megalomaniacs where it's hard to figure out which biographies are there because someone thought he or she was important rather than actually being important. Imagine an art student who needs to write a report about surrealism. If that art student came here, they might walk away citing Daniel C. Boyer as a major force in the field.

There is a certain amount of dishonesty here. Nowhere in any of my contributions to Wikipedia, my discussions on Talk pages, or indeed anywhere online, have I ever claimed in any way, that I am a major figure in surrealism. But there is a deeper problem, that you regard surrealism as an artistic movement, which it is not. If you had ever read even a single primary source on the subject, you would know this. If you had ever bothered to read the webpage of The Surrealist Movement in the United States, you would know this. Certainly, Critique_universitaire_nord-américaine_face_au_Surréalisme the level of falsification, half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies about surrealism on university campuses (as well as in secondary education) is extreme. The anti-surrealist "experts" on surrealism write their books, and don't even mention Franklin Rosemont, who really is a major figure in surrealism, they ignore the Surrealist Movement in the United States, and so on, all because they have decided, evidence be damned, that surrealism will have to live within the time limits they have arbitrarily assigned to it. With few exceptions I hardly think the academy, trying to shoehorn surrealism into an "art history" it supersedes, is an impartial arbiter. --Daniel C. Boyer 16:59, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

And get an "F" as their grade. Wikipedia is wondrous, but we've already agreed that it is not an experiment in complete anarchy. Limiting the amount of visibility a person can give to themselves or their works (specifically, we are talking about redirects) is a good idea. Daniel Quinlan 20:35, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)

Anyone who judges the importance of a topic, based on the number of redirects to its Wikipedia article, deserves an F. And a bullet.

You appear to be proposing deleting my imaginary Blizzard-created Starcraft redirect, and then letting someone else recreate it. Doesn't that sound like a waste of time? Martin

The number of redirects is only one aspect of apparent importance. A small one, I will grant you. That still leaves many other cases where leaving a link around forever, such as offensive ones or self-aggrandizing ones, has a significantly larger downside than just removing it completely. Daniel Quinlan 22:01, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)

Campaign against CamelCase

Can we launch a campaign against the archaic CamelCase redirects? They do mess up the search results and after this length of time there cannot be many external links to them. SimonP 20:27, Jul 31, 2003 (UTC)

Software change

discussion of software change moved to meta:Redirects and searching

How to redirect a page (bellringing)

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Saturday, August 2nd, 02003.

Can someone who knows about these things please do a redirect from Bell ringing and Bellringing to Campanology. I've just put "Bell ringing" into the Search box and apparently there was no article, but there is!
Adrian Pingstone 09:43 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Done. For the next time, you can do it yourself, it's rather easy:

Open any Wikipedia page.
Click into the address-field at the top of your browser. That's where http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_article stands.
Replace the name of the current article (Some_article in the above example) by the title of the page you want to create. Replace blanks by underscores. Hit Enter.
Click Edit this page on the following, empty page.
Insert #REDIRECT [[Campanology]] into the article field. Write redirect in upper case. Don't put a blank between # and REDIRECT. Put the target into double brackets.
Hit save. That's it.

-- JeLuF 10:03 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The article is at Bellringing and suggests that "Bellinging" is the correct term, JeLuf, you've made a double redirect. Mintguy 11:28 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

No, The Anome was, he moved from Campanology to Bellringing without fixing the redirects 2 hours after I created the redirects. -- JeLuF 08:18, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

My mistake. Sorry. -- The Anome 09:38, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Don't understand Redirect

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump:

I tried to make my first redirect page: Michigan Riding and Hiking Trail, and it doesn't seem to work. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? --Funpaul 20:53, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Nothing is wrong, Funpaul, everything works fine. Just click on the above link, it works. -- Cordyph 21:01, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I see it does now. But it didn't a few minutes ago, I tried a number of times...confused. There isn't a propogation time involved, is there?

This is explained at wikipedia:redirect. It's a feature to confuse newcomers... ;-) Martin

finding broken redirects

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump:

Is there a quick and easy way (i.e., not involving DDQs) to find broken redirects? I, for one, wouldn't mind going around making sure that any redirect that points to a red link either gets deleted or given a stub at the redirect site. Broken redirects are A Bad Thing because people won't realize that an article doesn't yet exist if they see the link in text, because it's blue, even if it doesn't go anywhere. This makes it that much harder for people who might be inclined to write an article if they new one was needed. --Dante Alighieri 04:21, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Special:Maintenance has a tool for this, but of course all that's presently disabled to keep the server from dying. At some point these things need to get reworked to be usable. Anyone who wants to code up improvements is welcome. --Brion 04:48, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Until an online query is again available, this might easily be extracted from the weekly SQL dumps, just like Short pages, Long pages, Orphaned pages, Most referenced pages, Most wanted pages. If Brion thinks this a good idea and is willing to run the scripts just like the Statistics scripts and upload the output, I will prepare a production version (= optimized, etc) of my current scripts in a few weeks time. The scripts produce two files per report, one in html format, one in wiki format which someone can copy/paste to the Wikipedia (in order to be able to edit the lists after corrections have been made). Erik Zachte 18:22, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Queries can be requested at Wikipedia:SQL query requests. I have it on my watchlist and so I usually run them within 24 hours, but so far Angela is the only one using it. In this case, an appropriate query would be "select cur_title, cur_namespace from cur,brokenlinks where cur_id=bl_from and cur_is_redirect=1 limit 100". I'll run it now. -- Tim Starling 15:01, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

NPOV redirects

What's the policy regarding redirects to page titles that are not NPOV ? We are currently having a discussion (Talk:Mohandas_Gandhi) regarding redirects. The issue is Mahatma Gandhi is considered a POV title since there are those who don't consider him a Mahatma (great soul, saint). They'd rather go with the actual name Mohandas Gandhi.

Convention in common names (Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(common_names)) suggests that the most common name by which a person was known should be the main page to which other pages redirect. Also the convention in redirects (Wikipedia:Redirect, Section: What do we use redirects for?, Pseudonyms, nicknames) suggests that actual names redirect to nicknames.

According to convention, Mohandas_Gandhi should redirect to Mahatma_Gandhi. But does this make a bad precedent that POV titles get more prominence than NPOV titles ? Whats the convention regarding NPOV titles for common names in general and redirects in particular. Jay 15:53, Sep 7, 2003 (UTC)

See the "don't overdo it" section at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names). Granted this a convention, not a policy but NPOV should apply to titles as well and trump common usage where appropriate (reasonable redirects should still exist though; "Nigger" redirecting to "African American" would not be called for, for example). However Mahatma Gandhi is a perfectly valid redirect because many people call him that without knowing the POV nature of the first "name" ; same for Ayatollah Khomeini - I had always assumed before that Ayatollah was his first name! But these titlesare depreciated by only being redirects. That's fine since everybody still gets to where they want to go. --mav

In summary, the convention for common names is that, a page can have as its title, a POV title of the person, as long as it is not of an abusive nature.
The convention for redirects is that, redirects are to be made from a less-popular actual name of the person to a more-popular common name if any. In case the common name happens to be POV, the redirect is the other way round, thus depreciating the POV title.
Can we add these conventions to the respective pages with examples and explanation.
Jay 23:09, Sep 10, 2003 (UTC)

List of redirects

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Saturday, September 13th, 02003.

I know that there is a page somewhere where all redirects are listed--its purpose, as I recall, is to have a way of preventing redirects from being orphaned once all links are re-aimed at the target site. I cannot find it or recall its name for the life of me, and I've just redirected Schoolteacher at Teacher. Jwrosenzweig 21:54, 8 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Part two to my query is this--how can we make such a page easier to find? I've been around for a while, remember its existence, and still can't find it. How would a newcomer, aware of redirects from our FAQ, be made aware? Is there an easy central directory I know nothing about? Is the page's name easy to remember (I had assumed it was Wikipedia:List of redirects or some such thing)? Could we make some mention of the page I'm asking about on Wikipedia:Redirect or is there a good reason not to? Confused but still smiling, Jwrosenzweig

I'm not sure it matters if a Redirect is orphaned. It remains out there as a Redirect to...well to redirect in the case where its name is typed in as a "Go" or "Search" element. You can always find a "living" redirect by typing in its name and noting that below the title to where it took you is .. the Redirect! Click and you are now There to change it, or review what links still go there (new ones are always a possibility). Hope this answers your questions; I could be way off? - Marshman 22:24, 8 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps you are correct...yet this list exists for a purpose, or at least someone felt it served one. Unless I'm hallucinating it, which I am beginning to fear I have. Apparently no one remembers this list? I must sit and think on it a little more...Jwrosenzweig 16:07, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)

Are you sure you're not thinking of the maintenance page's check for double redirects (redirects to redirects)? (It's currently disabled until someone rewrites these functions to not kill the database with slowness.) There was never a list of all redirects to my knowledge, and a list of "orphan" redirects doesn't really make sense; redirects catch hits both from within and from outside the wiki, and we can't really track the existence of external links. --Brion 16:21, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)

sheepish grin* All right, I've figured out what I was mis-remembering. It's Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages. Not for redirects at all. The only question I still have is, why do we list disambig pages and not redirects, but perhaps that's too big a task to take on. If anyone can tell me the answer, I'd appreciate it, but it's not urgent, obviously. Please forgive my faulty memory, Jwrosenzweig 17:55, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)

No tracking of Redirects because there is no need to (see above). Ideally, all Redirects would be orphans. And you always find them (see above) when you need to with the "GO" button. Disambiguation pages are regular articles (INMO) that help the user sort out just what he was looking for wherever there is likely to be confusion. Ideally these may or may not be orphans (personally, I think they are very valuable part of Wikipedia that are generally misunderstood) - 24.94.82.245 19:01, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)

Finding Articles with Apostrophes

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Saturday, September 13th, 02003.

This is probably an inane question, but I am afraid I have to ask it: How can you find an article with an apostrophe in its title? I have finished creating the article "Ramblers' Association", and unless people realise, and there are going to be some who don't realise, the title has an apostrophe, they aren't going to find it. "ramblers association" does not bring it up, neither does "ramblers" nor "rambler". The only time the apostrophed article comes up is if you type in the apo. Am I overlooking something? :) It is the correct title of the organisation. Can someone throw light on this? --Dieter Simon 18:22, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)

I think this is a good example of a page where redirects would be useful as the misuse of apostrophes is a common error so I added Ramblers Association and Rambler's Association. Angela 18:56, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)

Yes, I shall bear that in mind in future, thanks again. Why didn't I think of that? Dieter Simon 19:32, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)

Plan to move most of this page to meta soon

We need one place to develop MediaWiki documentation so I'm starting a project-neutral MediaWiki User's Guide in meta and think it would be a good idea to move most of this page to meta:MediaWiki User's Guide: Using redirects as soon as I'm done with the conversion. Only the Wikipedia-specific part of this page will remain and that will follow a short description of what a redirect is. --mav 03:14, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Ok, I restored the project-specific stuff. Other MediaWiki wikis might decide not to use redirects at all, or to use them very widely.

There are about five billion links here, some of which will need to be changed to point to the MediaWiki page on how to create/edit/etc redirects, and some of which are correctly referring to Wikipedia-specific policy, and some of which refer to both. meta:redirect will make linking to the meta stuff easier, at least. Martin 16:27, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

new bit about ambiguity

What is this new bit supposed to mean? Angela 23:37, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

"The redirect interferes with a technically proper exposition of the subject matter -- e.g., redirection of a well-defined, unambiguous term to a loose colloquial usage which is not properly synonymous, in such a manner that the unambiguous term would appropriately be a link within the colloquial article to which it redirects, and/or vice versa."

Well this got me stumped too. But I read it for 5 minutes and I think this is the gist of it : If a non-ambiguous article redirects to an ambiguous article, the redirect should be removed. Jay 14:47, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

That doesn't make sense though. What would be wrong with a redirect. If anything, shouldn't the ambiguous article be moved to the non-ambiguous title? I don't really understand the issue but I have a feeling the person who added this may be the same person currently wanting to remove the redirct from firearm to gun and I can't understand that either. (See Talk:gun. Angela 15:15, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I think anon just dislikes sub-topic redirects. Martin 15:41, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Islamofascism example

Islamofascism (this term is considered by some as pejorative) leads to terrorism...
- terrorism, redirect from Islamofascism...

This is a really bad example of the principle of least astonishment, because terrorism doesn't even mention Islamofascism. More an example of what not to do... Martin 09:16, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Redirect to headers not allowed?

Am I right in thinking that you can't REDIRECT to a Header within a page? I'm sure I read this somewhere shortly after discovering Wikipedia but I can't find where I might have seen it. I'm asking because I want to know how difficult it might be to combine several pages into one, one section per, and have each of the old pages REDIRECT to the appropriate header. How mad am I? (Serious answers only please :-) Phil 17:09, Nov 13, 2003 (UTC)

not that I know that it's "legal" to or not ... but wouldn't "#REDIRECT [[main article#heading]]" work? more later [mabey] reddi

Yes, Reddi is correct that will work. I tried it once and was immediately reverted with the comment that it was not a good idea because headers change or are easily changed, rendering the redirect impotent w/o the the person redoing the header knowing a problem was created. I guess I'd consider why you want to combine several articles. If each is rather small by themselves then the redirect to the combined page should not really need directs directly to a header; if there is that need for clarity, consider just keeping the pages separate. The way things link together around here (hypertext) the need to have a subject all laid out on a single outlined page is not so great as in a printed doc - Marshman 17:30, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)

On that "header change" thing, it should (?) defualt to the top of the page (when the anchor isn't found) ... and I haven't found any other info on this =-\ ... reddi

Well I found a clue lying around under my desk, seeing as I was too lazy to go out and buy one :-), and I tested this with a couple of Subpages off my User Page. And it appears not to work. If you go to the REDIRECT page and click on the link it says it REDIRECTs to, it goes straight to the correct header. If you actuate the REDIRECT, it doesn't, it just goes to the top of the correct page. What I don't know is whether this is conclusive since it might be the fact that I'm doing it in a User page, and it's quite obvious that they work differently since I don't get a TOC. I'm rather loath to play around anywhere else (and possibly mess something up) just to satisfy my curiosity if someone who actually knows can tell me. Just because it might be a stupid question doesn't mean I'm too embarassed to ask. And no, that doesn't mean I'm not embarassed :-) Phil 17:30, Nov 13, 2003 (UTC)

It does not work. I have put in a feature request, but the feature request will only get filled if a developer finds it an interesting project. If anybody good at snazzy web design can think of a way to emulate this with javascript, that would be very cool. DanKeshet 18:44, Nov 13, 2003 (UTC)

Note that the whole header change issue can be worked around by adding a comment above headings that you link to, ie.

==Heading linked to==

··gracefool |☺ 05:18, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Redirects phrased as questions

Does anybody think it would be a good idea to include questions answered by the article as redirects? Like What caused the American Civil War? redirecting to Origins of the American Civil War? Lots of people google in that way or ask Jeeves. Tuf-Kat 20:30, Dec 23, 2003 (UTC)

If the aim is to get Google hits, yes. If the aim is to create an encyclopedia... not so sure. Angela . 19:02, Jan 4, 2004 (UTC)

Three weeks after the creation of the What caused the American Civil War? redirect, the only hit on Google that relates to Wikipedia is this talk page, so it doesn't seem too useful anyway. Angela . 21:01, Feb 27, 2004 (UTC)

Disambiguation

I don't understand the latest addition to this page. How does a redirect facilitate disambiguation? Creating America (disambiguation) which redirects to America makes no sense at all to me. Angela . 19:02, Jan 4, 2004 (UTC)

It might be clearer if you look at Special:Whatlinkshere/America. BTW we added a note about it on Wikipedia:Disambiguation -- User:Docu.

All that shows is that there are some links that need fixing. Why would you create a disambiguation page that is just a redirect? There shouldn't be any links to a disambiguation page. Angela . 01:09, Jan 5, 2004 (UTC)

Usually there shouldn't, but sometimes there are, e.g. the few that link to America (disambiguation). Those don't need fixing. -- User:Docu

Angela. I think I have a better example of how a redirect facilitates disambiguation. Suppose two readers wanted information on the term "deaf". They enter the term in the "Find" field that appears on each Wikipedia page. The resulting page turns out to be "hearing impairment" which discusses all the causes of deafness and the medical practices involved in treating it. Now, suppose the reader was not looking for "deaf" in the sense of hearing impairment, but rather "deaf" in the sense of someone who identifies with deaf culture. They would not find discussion of the "cultural view of the term 'deaf' " on the "hearing impairment" article. This would mean that a disambiguation page is required; a page that distinguishes between "deaf" as an illness in one definition and "deaf" as a social phenomena in another definition. The disambiguation page might also have a definition of "deaf" as a disability. The term "deaf-as hearing impairment" can now be redirected to "deaf" the disambiguation page. Once there, the reader can choose the sense of "deaf" they are searching for and follow the appropriate link to an article that discusses that specific sense of the term. In theory, that is exactly how it would work. In practice it is sometimes a highly controversial thing to do.

For example, let's again use the term "deaf". Some people within the field of medicine refuse to acknowledge the term "deaf-as a cultural phenomena" is anything more than a fringe or freak explanation of the term coined by the community of deaf people who use sign language. Some doctors will refuse to accept the premise at all that the term "deaf" could every or in any circumstances but considered to describe a sense of personal identity with people who use signs to communicate, and that it can *only* be used to refer to the medical model that describes "deaf" as a type of hearing impairment. So that doctor or any person who believes as the doctor does, may be a Wikipedia contributor with tremendous skill in argumentation, writing and manipulating the features of Wikipedia's software. This person might redirect "deaf" to a article on "hearing impairment" and argue strongly and persusively that at no time should this term "deaf" be directed at any other view outside the medical model of the term. So an innocent reader may come to Wikipedia seeking information on deaf people who identify with the community of signing deaf persons and enter the search term "deaf". But they will forever and always be directed to "hearing impairment" as the means of defining the term. Suppose they then tried the term "deafness" and found that it, too, always resulted in arriving at the "hearing impairment" article. It would mean that this reader may not be able to find the sense of "deaf" they sought. Do such things occur on Wikipedia? Yes. It is the very reason I have chosen the term "deaf" and "deafness" to illustrate all of this. A Wikipedia contributor who is also an M.D. has done precisely this type of manipulation of the term "deaf" and "deafness", the two terms most like to be used in a search for information of cultural deafness. The logical solution is that "deaf" would redirect to a disambiguation page. Yet this contributor will not permit "deaf" to become associated with the cultural view of "deaf" even on a page that disambiguates the several view of the term. Such is the reality of Wikipedia. The only solution is to go through the lengthy Conflict Resolution process and argue one's view. But the length of that very process is a discouragement in and of itself and this is a tactic used by people who want to protect certain views of information. Experienced contributors know that when they force others to face a long process of conflict resolution, the complaining party is not likely to want to engage in the debate because it is not merely the length of the process that causes discouragement, but also the tremendous amount of negative discourse that surfaces in the process that tends to sour one's attitude whole motivation to contribute to Wikipedia. So, if you have an area of specialization you want to contribute, and that area of specialization is one that has potential for heated conflict, you must consider whether you want to spend you energy on writing article on the subject or spending the majority of your time arguing and defending yourself for such mundane acts as adding a comma to a sentence that 20 people will object to. That's the reality of Wikipedia. Old timers will call in favors from other contributors with whom they have collaborated for years and you will be hounded, savaged, accused of preposterous intentions, threatened, and when you defend yourself, even if with the most magnificent manners and respect, your responses will be flately brushed aside if invisible. The Wikipedia Reality, in my humble opinion. Ray Foster 22:03, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Village pump discussion

Many writers and reviewers are redirecting poorly to false articles - e.g if you are looking for "graphics" then you will be redirected to computer graphics. Engineering graphics and computer graphics are different topics and I don't understand [why this is so]. If anyone writes a short intro to start such an article, you will find those articles deleted immediately and redirected to other releavant artilces. There is no need for redirection. You can keep that space blank. I dont know why the heck [you] guys are doing it. This will definitely distract users from using wikipedia, and those writers who want to show their articles on wikipedia are doing this redirecting thing. Also, some of people from here are actually behaving like they are moderators or something like that. Also deletion of articles is very burning issue here. Why are articles deleted if they are not copyrighted? Could [it] be due to gramatical mistakes? If [you] guys from here are deleting articles constantly due to grammatical mistakes and lableing the article as stub then this is very poor thing. Wikipedia is just born project and not taken seriously, and as this project is in [an] immature state then this very serious matter. Well I think if there are any moderators here should take this thing seriously because if this continues then many people will sign up here to delete articles and label it a stub. Well this will be fun for these guys, and wikipedia will be destroyed in few days as this project took 2 years to reach this position it will be deleted in 2 weeks. As nupedia is down otherwise there is no need for this question. Also I will immediately move to nupedia if it starts, and tell others to do the same because when nupedia was there I hadn't found such issue. It's up to you whether to take this seriously or not but let me tell you that this is not good. (--61.1.112.99)

If anyone writes a short intro to start such an article, you will find those articles deleted immediately and redirected to other releavant artilces. Nonsense. I dont know why the heck [you] guys are doing it. This plainly isn't the only thing you don't the heck know. If [you] guys from here are deleting articles constantly due to grammatical mistakes and lableing the article as stub then this is very poor thing.. We aren't. And deletion and stubbification are entirly different things. this very serious matter no, it isn't. wikipedia will be destroyed in few days bollocks. I will immediately move to nupedia if it starts goodbye. -- Finlay McWalter 14:06, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Although I suspect that post might be a troll (hence, the need for extensive copyediting just to understand it), I'd like to try to respond to each of the points you make in kind.

Where redirection is concerned, for the most part, we'd rather set up wikipedia with all the proper links, and then split hairs (computer graphics vs engineering graphics) later, if need be. If you have a particular grudge against a particular redirect, please feel free to fix it.
Articles are deleted in one of two ways. Either it is a candidate for speedy deletion, or it goes through the Wikipedia:Votes for deletion page where it is voted upon for no fewer than five days. The short articles you refer to (which we call "stubs") are kept unless there is a very good reason not to. Generally, the only reasons we will delete an article is if it is (a) a copyright violation, or (b) non-encylopedic. (vandalism, of course, falls into the latter category)
Stub warnings - when someone writes an article he does not feel is quite detailed enough, he can put a warning there. It simply means that the article could be longer. This does not, in any way, destroy wikipedia. It simply lets others know where efforts should be concentrated.
Yes, there are moderators here - around 160 or so. In order to make wikipedia function, there has to be some seperation of privileges, to seperate vandals from legitimate contributors. As a rule, moderation is done with a very light touch.
As a simple look at Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth will tell you, Wikipedia is growing by leaps and bounds. There seems to be no evidence of the destruction you imply.

--Raul654 14:10, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)

61.1.112.99 wrote: If anyone writes a short intro to start such an article, you will find those articles deleted immediately and redirected to other releavant artilces.

Finlay McWalter wrote: Nonsense.

Actually, this has happened several times to articles I've started (when both logged in and with a random IP). Homology modelling would be one example, off the top of my head. (Not that it really matters, but as a new contributor I did find it very disconcerting.) Stewart Adcock 01:39, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)]

Redirects do not have to be redirects forever. They are often a temporary solution until a real article is written at that place. If someone enters a sub-stub and that is redirected, there is nothing stopping someone editing the redirect and replacing it with a non-sub-stub. Angela . 07:29, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Moved from Village Pump by Tuf-Kat

Redirect annotation policy?

Something I've wondered about, why are redirects not annotated with the reason for the redirect? Is there a policy or accepted way of doing things on this? Thanks. Elde 19:10, 29 Jan 2004 (UTC)

With most redirects I believe the reason is quite clear. If the redirect is because a page was moved, the page's discussion page should explain why. If not, raise the question there. And you CAN of course use the discussion page of any redirect itself: just click the 'redirected from foo' link after you've been redirected to get at the redirect article. Jo r 19:44, 29 Jan 2004 (UTC)

This has come up before, and I think there was a consensus to change redirect annotation so that choices were #VARIANT (for capitalization differences or other names, equally valid), #MISSPELLING (so that the "redirected from" changes to "redirect from a misspelling") and #DISCOURAGED (or something to that effect, when a name that used to be acceptable is now rarely used, such as Mohameddan, Zaire or Negro, perhaps). Doing something like this has an added bonus of maybe allowing for disambig blocks based on the source of a redirect. Of course, I'm drawing a complete blank right now, but there are numerous examples of a redirect which could have more than one article referrent -- a normal disambig block looks strange if you don't come from the redirect, because the real title and the potential title don't have anything in common, but having more complex redirect terminology could allow for presenting disambig blocks depending on the source of the viewer). Anyway, I think there was general agreement to do something similar to this, but not enough social impetus to coerce any developers into doing it. Tuf-Kat 19:56, Jan 29, 2004 (UTC)

I am not alltogether sure I understand you, but would Louis Napoleon Bonaparte be an example? It could conceivably redirect to Louis Bonaparte (Konijn van Olland) or Napoleon III of France, who shares his father's names. Jo r 20:10, 29 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Who should we nag to get that implemented! It looks like a great idea. WormRunner 22:33, 29 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Yes, Louis Bonaparte is an example of what I'm talking about. Since it could refer to the son but, in all likelihood, is referring to the father, Napoleon Bonaparte could have a disambig block if you come from Louis, just in case, but not otherwise. To make this happen, I'd go to Wikipedia talk:Redirects and get some concrete proposals down (i.e. exactly what the syntax would be, what would happen to old-style redirects, etc) and then nag User:Tim Starling or User:Eloquence or some other developer (there's a list somewhere). Tuf-Kat 00:45, Jan 30, 2004 (UTC)

Annotated redirecs sounds like a cool idea for me, but I think using a pipe syntax would be more in common with how wikipedia is working. I.e. #redirect[[Napoleon (disambiguation page)|Redirect for disambiguation]]. -- till we *) 18:33, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Hmm. Also a great idea, and much more flexible. WormRunner 06:36, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)

orphaned redirects

I created some orphaned redirects today, and another user said that they personally didn't like the practice. I created The Teacup Poisoner (and variations) to redirect to Graham Frederick Young (a serial killer and what he was nicknamed by the press). Here's my rational as I posted it to the other users talk page as we discussed it: "IMHO orphaned redirects shouldn't be a problem, I mean wikipedia is still growing, and I added those redirects on the offchance that in the future someone will try to link to that phrase. When I'm wikifying an article, I tend to remove incidental links if they come up red rather than leaving them in in case someone creates an article called that in the future, I suspect most people do the same but it doesn't help develop wikipedia into a strong network of links if you think about it. (Did that make sense?)" What's the consensus on orphaned redirects? Am I commiting a solecism and drawing universal hatred upon myself by creating them? :) Fabiform 06:52, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure if I understood the question, but Redirects are usually orphaned, i.e. no article links to the redirect. The one you added avoids that another Duplicate article is created. -- User:Docu

That makes sense. I spent ages editing an article that appeared in cleanup, then discovered it was a duplicate, and had to spend even longer merging the two articles. So, it's OK to create redirects to an article, even if they are never used? Fabiform 07:37, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I did that once too before I was shown the way :) The problem is that it looks as if there is an article when there obviously isn't (yet). So someone clicking a blue link, will come up to an edit window. Also, it could be that the redirect is wrong, and people will follow an incorrect link. Dori | Talk 07:04, Jan 30, 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing here Dori. The redirects I created do point to a fully fledged article (Graham Frederick Young), what I meant by saying they are orphaned (and forgive me if that's not the right term) is that no article links to the redirect. For example, this is the "what links here" page for one of my redirects. Nothing links to it, I just created it on the offchance someone tried to link to the phrase the teacup poisoner. My question is, is this OK? :) Fabiform 07:37, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Ah my mistake. Yes, I still do this type of thing all the time. In fact, I wish more people would do it, but others disagree. I usually do it for common mispellings, capitalizations (as in titles that have more than one word), plural, singular forms, etc. Dori | Talk 14:17, Jan 30, 2004 (UTC)

The redirect "The Teacup Poisoner" actually leads to the article about him, so no risk of confusion. It isn't even a "Redirect with possibilities" (here is preferable to link to the redirect rather than the article). Besides, just avoid linking [[The Teacup Poisoner]] within [[Graham Frederick Young]]. -- User:Docu

Unless there are lots of serial killers who poisoned people by slipping drugs into cups of tea? ;) Fabiform 07:47, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Yes, by all means create as many redirects as possible to avoid having duplicate articles created in the future and increasing the change an article is linked.--Jia ng 01:51, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)

alternate vs. alternative

Shouldn't that prominent repeated word "Alternate" (which I think of as "left right left right ...) be "Alternative"? (It may have been discussed here, but a quick scan didn't show me.) (:-)

robinp 03:58, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Redirects for sorting

Following several suggestions, I tried to combine redirects and a msg (Template:R_to_sort_name) for sorting people by surname ( Special:Whatlinkshere/MediaWiki:R_to_sort_name). Maybe we could use this to expand list like List of people by name. -- User:Docu

Adjectives

There should be an official guideline that adjectives redirect to nouns. (If there isn't one already).

For example: Renal should redirect to kidney. Happy should redirect to happiness.

I can't think of many cases where this should not occur (perhaps only if the adjective is ambiguous). Bensaccount 16:33, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This was actually supposed to be a question. Bensaccount 04:03, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes. - IMSoP 22:35, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

(Oh, alright then, I'll put a proper answer rather than just a joke - I think this is a good idea, and would fit in well with our existing policy on plural vs singular nouns (and no, I can't be bothered to link the page, you'll have to find it yourself :-D))

I've just created the R from related word template. It seems like a good candidate for exactly this kind of redirect. My original intention applied to differing noun forms (e.g. Symbiont redirects to Symbiosis). Redirecting adjective (or verb?) forms to their appropriate noun forms seems like an excellent use for this tag.

Sexist re-directs

Latest comment: 20 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

A sexist re-direct is a redirect of either of 2 kinds:

A re-direct from a gender-specific word to a gender-neutral word
A re-direct from a gender-neutral wofd to a gender-specific word

What, with your current knowledge, is the best way to get rid of a sexist re-direct?? The answer is, of course, depends on which kind.

For the former kind, it takes at least moderate skill. Girl was originally a re-direct to child. However, see the comments at Talk:Girl and it was decided that the sexism can be removed by re-directing to woman. This took a lot of work, with part of the intermediate stuff being having girl a page of its own that is not a re-direct.

For the latter kind, it really isn't difficult. Sweetheart was originally a re-direct to girlfriend. However, upon seeing it, I made it into a dis-ambiguation page for boyfriend and girlfriend. This can be done using the same technique used to turn ANY re-direct into a dis-ambiguation page. No more intermediate work was used than the general change from a re-direct to a dis-ambiguation page.

Does Wikipedia currently have any sexist re-directs?? Upon finding any, please make sure you know which of the 2 kinds above it is and knowing how it is to be done. 66.32.124.187 02:57, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Redirect warriors

Latest comment: 19 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

From time to time here comes a guy and starts "fixing rediects". A recent example is massive change of Trans-Siberian railroad into Transsiberian railway.

It is one thing to fix redirects from, e.g., common misspellings. It is totally meaningless IMO thing to replace a perfectly valid and almost as common name, like in the example above. In some particular case I fixed some time ago, the article author intentionally used an archaic term, only to be "fixed" by some overzealous wikipeditor.

Guys, please be reasonable. Think about other useful things you can do, like Wikipedia:New pages patrol. Mikkalai 18:25, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

There seems to be a 'redirects are evil' mindset among some people here. Not sure where exactly that came from ... possibly from the 'linking to disambiguation pages is evil' idea.

IMO, one should rarely change the linked-from text, that's what the pipe-link is for. But really, is there any reason why a pipe-link is BETTER than a redirect? It's just two ways of handling the same thing: linking from a string of text to a page whose title is not the same. One method keeps it all in the linked-from page, another uses a secondary redirect page, but I don't really see a reason why to change it.

It's possibly a squid/database load issue ... using the redirect takes two hits; piping the redirect at the point it is anchored takes a single hit. As others have said, though, there's never any reason to change the anchor text to deal with the reirect issue. --Tagishsimon

They are actually both one request (we don't use http redirects, instead the 'redirected' content is served at the requested url). But: Because we currently don't have a good way to find out which pages redirect to a certain page (for purging), so they aren't cached as a result. This will very likely change with 1.4 where the redirect will re-use the cached content of the 'real' page. -- Gabriel Wicke 08:13, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

As Mikkalai says, if the linked-from text is actually inaccurate and it's a context where that matters, then it should be changed ... —Morven 02:46, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

As the person who did the redirects to Trans-Siberian railway, let me explain my reasoning. It was based on what happens when you move a page, and you get the following warning: "Links to the old page title will not be changed; be sure to check for double-redirects (using "What links here") after the move. You are responsible for making sure that links continue to point where they are supposed to go." As far as I'm concerned, an article that points to "Trans-Siberian Railroad" when the actual article is at "Trans-Siberian railway" is not pointing where it is supposed to go. I understood that the point of redirects was to deal with people looking things up from outside Wikipedia, rather than badly-formatted wikilinks. However, I concede that in most if not all of those articles I should probably have piped the redirect rather than changing the text. Some articles are formatted in British English (railway); some are in American English (railroad); the important thing is consistency within the article. I will give myself a slap on the wrist and a task to check that all the pages linking to Trans-Siberian railway are still consistent. --ALargeElk 08:48, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

The discussion lets me undestand "the root of the evil". All this redirect/piping thing is simply a techie mindset: you are trying to "help" computer to do the job (of readdresing), whil it should be exactly vice versa: computers are here to help us write articles (and read articles). Using pipes and fixing redirects is IMO like writing pieces of code in assembly language where the compiler is dumb and cannot optimize. It ought to be done sometimes, but if you have to do it almost everywhere, this should be the hint that either the overall design is wrong or atavistic instincts come creeping. I know that "real programmers" write in FORTRAN, but... Mikkalai 15:46, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Regarding redirect pages

Just wondering, how many is too many? I can't remember if I've asked this before, but someone is creating literally dozens of redirect pages for Japanese topics employing every combination of correct, incorrect and mixed romanization systems and misspellings he can think of, the vast overwhelming majority of which are not used at all or are exceedingly rarely used in Japanese or English. Some articles have 9 different redirect pages. So where do we draw the line? Exploding Boy 09:25, May 28, 2004 (UTC)

As with most things Wikipedian, opinions differ. I would say that if there's a chance a term might be searched for or linked to then it is worth having a redirect for that term (whether it's a legitimate alternative term or just a typo or misspelling), and I'd rather we have too many redirects than too few. Redirects don't, on the whole, do any harm, but you might want to take a look at Wikipedia:Redirect#When should we delete a redirect? if you've not already done so. --Camembert

Alternates or alternatives

The terminology here was used to create a series of "Templates:" for redirects. Chameleon suggest to change them to "alternative" (R for alternate capitalisation) and already had made this "minor change" here. Changing it here, would imply fixing a series of messages in redirects. I prefer not to change one without all the others. -- User:Docu.

As many as possible need to be corrected. — Chameleon 13:55, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)

How many redirects for a same article?

I am a newcomer, so I prefer to ask the question here rather than post an inappropriate VfD... I was flipping through the "recent changes" page and found out a new article about Shotaro Morikubo. I don't know if an anime/video games voice actor really deserves an article in an encyclopedia, but this is not the main problem. What I find a bit over-the-top is that, according to its What links here page, there are at least 15 (!) other entries redirecting to this article, each one with a slightly different spelling. Does that make sense? --Alexandre 08:53, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It's a Japanese name, so you get a lot of redirects based on the various different rules for romanizing Japanese. Then you get a duplicate set based on the name/surname order reversal between Japanese and English. Given that it's unlikely that anyone will link to any of the variations without meaning this guy, it doesn't hurt anything to have them. -- Cyrius|✎ 09:13, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The redirects were probably created by User:WhisperToMe. They don't cause any harm (except for making the "What Links Here" a bit harder to use) and they are better than that user's previous practice of including all possible romanizations in the first sentence of every article on a Japanese subject. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style for Japan-related articles for very extensive discussion of this issue. Gdr 12:44, 2004 Jul 4 (UTC)

I hit 38 redirects, mainly from User:WhisperToMe, at Ras al-Khaimah Whatlinkshere, but not "Ras al Khaima" which I needed. Is there a page with a record number? --Henrygb 18:16, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Date redirects

I imagine this has been brought up somewhere before, but....whole swathes of redirects could be created like the following:

I've created several such lists of links at User:Sjorford/Date redirects, and as you can see, a random few of these do exist as redirects, but most don't. I can see several reasons why they might be useful, but before I go and create several thousand new redirects, I thought I'd better get some opinions!

Any chance somebody could run a report to find how many dead links there are that would be fixed by all these redirects? I imagine it's not many, but you never know. sjorford 13:08, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This is a bad idea. If they are not redirects, people are forced to type one of the accepted date formats, which keeps articles far more consistent. Abbreviations like "Aug 3" look awful in articles anyway, so these should be discouraged, not made possible through redirects. Angela . 18:25, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)

I would say the various AD formats are valid redirects as they do not share the same hideousness problem. (We might even want CE and BCE redirects). - SimonP 18:31, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)

Redirects and links to empty pages

Following on from some comments above, I am quite surprised that there are so many redirects and links to empty pages. These are not on the list of good things and may even be on the list of bad things. Is it possible to reduce their numbers using some form of search and replace mechanism?
Bobblewik 19:52, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

A link to an empty page can be positive. For example, on the Allen Iverson page, there's a link to the NBA Finals, a link that as you can see does not work yet. It's positive for 2 reasons: 1) Maybe someone will see it and decide to write the article, 2) Once the article is written, the link will become active (as long as the name is accurate).

But redirecting to an empty page is bad. Salasks 01:33, Aug 6, 2004 (UTC)

A low-to-medium quality list of redirects to articles which don't exist can be found here. As always in the world of wiki, anyone and everyone is welcome to fix these! - TB 10:53, Aug 6, 2004 (UTC)
- Sometimes the redirects point to deleted pages. One just forgot to delete them as well. -- User:Docu
- Good news, and bad news. That report doesn't handle diacritical characters well, so about 5% or so, are actually working just fine (I've marked the ones I found to be working). The bad news is that Jane March, for example, is a dead redir because User:Lucky6.9 turned a "b-movie bandit" entry into a redir for her most notable movie, which, unfortunately, we don't have an article on (um, that's unfortunate more for the dead redir than any claim the movie is worth watching--it only is if you like certain types). I can stub her after I go home. I really appreciate your pages like this, TB--I've helped do some of the work off of several of them. Niteowlneils 04:50, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Links to empty pages are good for the two reasons given by User:Salasks. Redirects to empty pages are also good, because they pre-emptively prevent duplicate articles being written. I have created redirects to empty pages when I know that eventually an article will be written on a subject with several names. By making the redirects first, I can make it more likely that the article, when it is written, will end up at the right place. The main problem with redirects to empty pages is that they don't show up as "red links" in the referring page (but that problem applies equally to links to substubs). Gdr 14:05, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

I've seen this get out of hand on some pages, such as EGovernment. In this example, my gut says many of the links go to terms that will never have articles created for them. -- Stevietheman 14:40, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Going thru the prose, I was going "huh?", then I got to the list of 'issues' and definately agree. Niteowlneils 04:50, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I should have been more explicit in saying that the multiple empty links exist in the long, long list of 'issues'. :) Further, when I brought that up in its Talk before, its principal author couldn't see my point--perhaps if others went in there and said the same thing I'm saying, maybe the article could be modified. -- Stevietheman 15:17, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Question

It seems that I cannot make redirects more than one deep. That is, if A redirects to B, and B redirects to C, calling A will not go to C, but stop at B.

This is a problem because, as Wikipedia gets more complex, ultimately concepts will be linked together in a graph that needs to support 2-ply and maybe even 3-ply redirects.

Could someone fix this, the next time Wikipedia is recoded? Thanks. Malicious Monday 02:39, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

This is to stop circular redirects. There are bots that run to fix double redirects. Angela . 00:46, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)

surnames

Many surnames (Heisenberg, Schrödinger, ...) redirect to the page for the full name. But this is not always the case (e.g. Veltman). Is it possible to automate this by marking certain entries as full names? If not, wouldn't it be good to always manually redirect? E.g., should I create a redirect page from Veltman to Martinus J.G. Veltman? (In this case, you even need to know his initials to find the page quickly; a site-wide Google search for "Veltman" or "Martinus Veltman" finds only pages with Nobel Prize winners and physicists, and these then link to the "Martinus J.G. Veltman" page. It also finds a link that edits the Veltman page, but not the Veltman page itself. A site-wide Yahoo search for "Veltman" yields the "Martinus J.G. Veltman" page as the first hit.) Fpahl 05:44, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The policy is to use pagenames with only surnames in case the person is widely known by his/her surname, far more than any other person with the same surname. The situation you've just described only shows that Martinus J.G. Veltman is not that widely known by his surname compared to other Veltman's. -- Paddu 19:51, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Redirects to categories

Latest comment: 18 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Is it possible to make a redirect to a category? I could not find any info about this on the "redirect help" page. I tried it on this page: Flamenco singers. Walden 21:54, 2004 Sep 14 (UTC)

It's possible, but cross-namespace redirects should be avoided. -- User:Docu

Care to tell me how? The used technique does not work.

Does anyone agree I should create an Flamenco_singers article (with a category pointer) instead of redirect to the the Flamenco_vocalists category? Walden 14:32, 2004 Sep 16 (UTC)

#REDIRECT [[Category:Flamenco vocalists]] will work, but it does mean that Flamenco singers will show up as part of the category. Angela . 03:52, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

Is it possible that when you redirect to a category, it doesn't show in the category list, because else you get too much doubles in your category list.

There's a bug that when you redirect to a category, when you click on the link, the articles don't show up, just the category header. It's in Bugzilla already. Noel (talk) 16:57, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

(Simple version of Redirects) - Wrong

I don't know why this was on the page. AFAIK it is simply wrong. Am I missing something? JesseW 11:23, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

(Simple version of Redirects)

1. Type '''#REDIRECT [[title to redirect  
 to]] in the page you want to direct AWAY from.

2. Go to the Article which you want to be directed to 
and type '''#REDIRECT [[title of the redirect 
 page]]

3. Save page and then the Redirect will activate. Simply  
delete Step 2's redirect text and the redirect will remain   
while keeping the original article free of useless text.
(Simple Version End)

Modify target page of redirect

Is it possible to make a page undergo slight modification when it is redirected to? See, e.g., Orchidaceae, which is redirected to from Orchid. The word "orchid" has multiple meanings and a disambiguation page, but if someone typed in "Orchidaceae" they wouldn't need the notice at the top of the page about alternate meanings of "orchid".

I am not sure that that is desirable. See for example Derry and County Londonderry which are also redirects from Londonderry and County Derry respectively. I think the double diambiguation links are useful whether you type in Derry or Londonderry to start. Similarly, even if someone arrives "direct" at Orchidaceae, you still don't know whether they may have clicked on an orchid looking link. --Henrygb 12:17, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Redirects as it applies the the GFDL

If one page has been heavily edited, then the sysops decide to consolidate the material from two different sources under, say, a "Category" where a "move" is impossible, will the use of the Redirect which doesn't tranfer the edit history, violate the GFDL?

The reason I ask this is that our site uses MediaWiki and a user has complained that he created stuff on the original page, and because the history doesn't transfer, their work isn't noted in the history of the new page. How has Wikipedia handled such claims, or does the fact that the original creators work still appears in the history of the original page satisfy the needs of the GFDL?

Redirect to other than top of page

Latest comment: 18 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I created a redirect (Signed English) to a specific relevant section of a larger article (Manually Coded English#Signed English), but when clicking on the Signed English link, I'm taken to the top of the Manually Coded English page (rather than the Signed English section). Is there a way to fix this? One day Signed English will have it's own page, but in the meantime...

Hope this page is the right place for this comment. -- ntennis 02:33, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You can only redirect to articles, not sections in them; although the syntax allows them (e.g.#REDIRECT [[University of Cambridge#History]]) they don't work. Noel (talk) 16:57, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Use stubs instead of redirects for scientific terms

Latest comment: 18 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Science is full of terms that represent really trivial concepts that are part of something much bigger. It's very tempting to put redirects from those trivial concepts to the bigger ideas, such as redirecting electron shell to energy level. I think it's a very bad idea. If page A redirects to page B, it leads the reader to believe that terms A and B are equivalent. An electron shell is NOT the same thing as an energy level. --Smack (talk) 05:09, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

I support the worrying and partially the suggested solution. Another solution would be to explicitly list in the beginning of a big article on a formal scientific topic the terms that are defined through the text. Like this: In this article, the following formal terms from Area of Science are defined: ..., ..., ... and give internal links to the places in the article with the definitions.--Imz 02:17, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

deletion of a redirect- is it wise?

Example of when to delete a redirect, from the article: "It is a cross-space redirect out of article space, such as one pointing into the User or Wikipedia namespace." Would this include the redirect at Redirection, which redirects to Wikipedia:Redirect? -FZ 16:07, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I say that it does. --Smack (talk) 21:25, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This was there so that when the article meta:Help:Redirect was copied to en:Wikipedia:, the example still worked. I have modified the Meta: page so that the Redirection redirect is no longer needed. Noel (talk) 2 July 2005 03:26 (UTC)

New double redirect cleanup project

I've identified around 1,100 double redirects as of the May database dump. The cleanup project is at User:Triddle/double_redirect/20050516. Triddle 23:28, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

Loop redirect within article

Latest comment: 18 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The link Unrelated redirect right at the bottom of the article is a loop redirect back to this article. I'm not sure what it's supposed to do so I haven't tried to fix it, but I guess it should just be deleted. Shantavira 14:26, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

More Specific Redirects

Latest comment: 18 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

When a page is redirected onto an article with several headings, shouldn't the redirect link target the most appropriate heading?

Example: Amelia Bones redirects to Minor Ministry officials in Harry Potter, when a better target would be Minor Ministry officials in Harry Potter#Amelia Bones.

I noticed that nobody seems to be doing this. Is there any reason not to make more specific targets? --Alex Nisnevich (talk) 16:32, 20 July 2005 (UTC) [edited Brian Jason Drake 16:03, 27 December 2005 (UTC)]

I commented on this a while ago (see above). It seems that the 'more specific target' gets ignored when in a redirect. I guess it's a limitation of the wiki software? I changed the redirect for Amelia Bones to Minor Ministry officials in Harry Potter#Amelia Bones as you suggested. Try clicking on Amelia Bones now and if your browser behaves like mine does you'll get taken to the top of the page anyway, not the "Amelia Bones" heading. I had the same problem with Signed English which should redirect to Manually Coded English#Signed English. -- ntennis 07:21, 21 July 2005 (UTC) [edited Brian Jason Drake 16:03, 27 December 2005 (UTC)]

You can only redirect to articles, not sections in them; although the syntax allows them (e.g.#REDIRECT [[University of Cambridge#History]]) they don't work. Noel (talk) 16:57, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Thankyou user:Jnc for this answer and adding the info to the project page :) — ntennis 04:08, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Double redirect study

Hello, I've started a study on the problem of double redirects and the possible solutions. The study is at Wikipedia:Computer help desk/double redirect study and I would appreciate as many eyeballs as possible to take a look at it. I'd like to stop the problem of double redirects and I'm sure lots of people here have some insight they can share. Heres to hopping we can put this problem behind us! Triddle 16:41, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

CamelCase redirects

Latest comment: 18 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

There has been some discussion on whether we should continue to keep these, as a general principle (see here for what this is about). I have set up a poll at WT:RfD#CamelCase redirects; anyone who wishes to express an opinion on whether to keep or get rid of CamelCase redirects (as a class) should do so there. Noel (talk) 17:08, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Renaming of #REDIRECT {{special tags}}

Latest comment: 18 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I've made a proposal to rename the aditional template message tags added to Redirect pages. It's been cross posted to

—Pengo 02:56, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

...and Radiant! has made a proposal to delete them all instead. See WP:TFD. —Cryptic (talk) 14:53, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Please add example redirect usage for mixed case article titles

Please add a usage instance something like this:

Entry: Some article titles are (properly) mixed case. To ensure that Go searches find them, add one redirect in non-mixed case

Example: For an article page titled "Vice Chancellor of Austria" add a redirect page title "Vice chancellor of austria".

Reason: See discussion here. Thanks! -- Sitearm | Talk 21:30, 2005 August 21 (UTC)

It's done. Thanks! -- Sitearm | Talk 05:23, 2005 August 22 (UTC)

Categorization of redirects

Latest comment: 18 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion

Is there any stylistic prohibition on categorizing redirects? I am filling in gaps for fictional countries that redirect to the Places in the Wheel of Time series article, but feel they should also be in Category: Wheel of Time places. I don't want to get mass-reverted, though... nae'blis _(talk) 15:21, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

As far as I know, redirects can't be categorized (on submit, the software essentially ignores anything following the #redirect line and deletes it when the change is submitted). -- Rick Block (talk) 18:28, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually we use the "R for foo" templates for this. See Category:Redirects and WP:R for a list of templates. ∞Who ?¿? 18:53, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually it works just fine, Rick; you just have to include the category code on the same line as the redirect. What I was asking about was whether it was stylistically kosher, not technically possible (see the category above for what I've done so far). nae'blis _(talk) 20:06, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

hmm, well not to answer for Rick, but I found that some users like it and some don't. I personally prefer it, becuase it gives us a quick reference to what redirects exist, and what they are doing. It's not necessarily an eye sore, because no one really ever sees them :) ∞Who ?¿? 20:20, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Ah, clever. So you have topics which are simply redirects, but you want the topic to appear in a relevant category (not a category of redirects), like for example Arad Doman. This basically amounts to adding the redirected to article to the category multiple times (right?). Since I wasn't even aware this works, I'm clearly not aware of any relevant stylistic guidelines. If you have any intent to expand the topics to actual articles IMO this would be unquestionably fine. If the redirects will forever remain redirects, I'm not so sure but I don't think anyone would really mind. You might also ask at WP:CG. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:48, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, technically I suppose the article is showing up more than once. And you're exactly right, Arad Doman is an example of what I'm after. Ideally, if/when the WikiProject_WheelOfTime gets of the ground, we should be able to expand those articles. But up until today Manetheren was a redlink, which doesn't seem right... Thanks for the tip(s). nae'blis _(talk) 02:20, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Which redirect category for a name with article (the)?

Latest comment: 18 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Say, which one of the redirect categories would you use for The Mahabharata (redirecting to Mahabharata)? (I used {{R from plural}}.) Perhaps, the answer should be mentioned on the main page.--Imz 01:32, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Replacing old redirect - validity of statement on the project page

Latest comment: 18 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

From When should we delete a redirect?...

"if a redirect is reasonably old, then it is quite possible that its deletion will break links in old versions of some other articles — such an event is very difficult to envision and even detect."

Doesn't the "What links here" tool help you detect such a problem?--Commander Keane 08:22, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

No, the "What links here" tool only helps you detect links in current versions, not old versions. However, I don't think that old versions should be a reason to not delete redirects that seem harmful now, no matter how old they are. Kusma (talk) 15:08, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Double redirects

Latest comment: 18 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Whenever we move a page, we are reminded to check for double re-directs and fix them, if any. However, whenever we merge two articles, and convert one of them into a re-direct, we do not get reminded to check for double re-directs. We should probably be reminded whenever a re-direct is made so that this problem can be remedied by the initiator of the re-direct himself. I have placed this suggestion on Wikipedia talk:Double redirects as well but not much action has taken place on that page of late. --Gurubrahma 10:43, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Redirect from scientific nomenclature?

Latest comment: 18 years ago3 comments1 person in discussion

There is an article, Philippine Pond Turtle, with a redirect from Leyte Pond Turtle -- which I consider to be a simple "redirect from alternate name." However, there is also a redirect to it from Heosemys leytensis. My question is, should this second one be an "R from alternate name" or an "R from alternate language" -- or should there be a separate category, perhaps "R from scientific name"?— Eoghanacht ^talk 14:50, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

It seems to me that this is a case where some people will want to track these redirects as a specific group (or subgroup). Without objection, I shall create it. — Eoghanacht ^talk 15:54, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Duh! This category already existed, but was not listed in the project page table. I just added it. — Eoghanacht ^talk 16:45, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

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