Wikipedia talk:Redirect

For deletion of redirects see below, and also in Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy/redirects

Enforcement

Should this page be enforced on articles? An editor is insisting that he be allowed to create redirects in Second Amendment to the United States Constitution based on what is said in this page. I believe he is treating this page as a policy when it is only a guideline. A guideline means a strong recommendation and so is not binding. I believe redirects should not usually be created, unless there is a strong justification for doing so. In this case, the editor at issue believes that editors have difficulty editing with direct links in place as opposed to with the redirects. I think this is baseless. If this editor is right, then redirects should be created whenever they would be shorter than direct links. Rather than getting into an edit war, I would like to know what other editors have to say on this issue. SMP0328. (talk) 00:12, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

In a word, yes WP:NOTBROKEN applies to articles. older ≠ wiser 00:21, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

So should editors go around to article and create redirects? SMP0328. (talk) 00:29, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

No. Have you read WP:NOTBROKEN? What it says is that you should go around trying to fix redirects that aren't broken. Redirects exist for many reasons and are a convenience for readers and editors alike. There is very little benefit to editing an article for the sole purpose of fixing redirects. older ≠ wiser 00:35, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

You seem to agree with me. Articles should not be edited simply to fix, create, eliminate redirects. However, that is what happened in this case. SMP0328. (talk) 00:43, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

Ah, I had only looked at the one link you provided, which seemed to imply that TJRC was simply undoing an edit where you had changed the redirects to direct links. I can see now from the edit history that it is a little more complicated. While I would not have edited as TJRC has, I can sort of understand the point. Piped links, especially where the direct link is very long, can make it a little more difficult to read the raw wikitext while editing. Since the other editor has expressed a strong opinion on the matter and the redirects don't actually hurt anything for readers and might have some benefit for editors, I suggest that you just leave the redirects be. older ≠ wiser 01:03, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

Sorry for not being clearer with my linking and thank you for seeing my point. However, wouldn't your advice to me apply at least as much to TJRC? SMP0328. (talk) 01:08, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

Sure, like I said, I would not have edited the way he/she did. older ≠ wiser 01:14, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

• Belated comment. I disagree with SMP0328 about needing a strong reason to create redirects. Redirects are cheap. If there's a not-completely-trivial use for the redirect and no good reason not to create it (e.g. ambiguity), then yes, create it. That said, I'm not sure about the redirects in this case. Is incorporation doctrine really unambiguous? --Trovatore (talk) 22:11, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

New exception proposed to "do not fix redirects"

I am proposing a new exception to the general rule that "there are no good reasons to pipe links solely to avoid redirects. It is almost never helpful to replace redirect with redirect":

• It is appropriate to to replace redirect with redirect where the redirect is an acronym in order to allow a reader to see the acronym spelled out by hovering over the link.

WP:ACRONYM says that generally an acronym should be spelled out the first time it appears in an article. This rule may not be appropriate for infoboxes and tables where spelling out the acronym would mess up the formatting. Piping the full name behind the acronym allows the reader to find out what the acronym means by hovering, and without having to click through.

I do not think that this is inconsistent with any of the reasons not to change (bypass) redirects:

• "Redirects can indicate possible future articles."

>> This does not apply -- in fact, acronym redirects are often later changed to disambiguation pages.

• "Introducing unnecessary invisible text makes the article more difficult to read in page source form."

>> Tables and infoboxes are not going to be read in the page source form anyway.

• "Non-piped links make better use of the "what links here" tool, making it easier to track how articles are linked and helping with large-scale changes to links."

>> Improving the reader's ability to understand the article should take precedence over tracking how are articles are linked.

• "Shortcuts or redirects to subsections of articles or Wikipedia's advice pages should never be bypassed, as the section headings on the page may change over time. Updating one redirect is far more efficient than updating dozens of piped links."

>> Not applicable.

• "If editors persistently use a redirect instead of an article title, it may be that the article needs to be moved rather than the redirect changed. As such the systematic "fixing of redirects" may eradicate useful information which can be used to help decide on the "best" article title. "

>> WP:NAME covers this.

Comments? Ground Zero | t 13:33, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose. Relevant information should never be coded into the linking structure; hovering over a link is something most readers will not think to do, and we should not take it into consideration as a factor in making decisions. If it is important to explain what the acronym stands for, then this should be done explicitly in text rather than by coding it into a pipe. --Trovatore (talk) 21:06, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose for much the same reason as Trovatore. If there is any value to explaining what an acronym stands for, it should be done in the text and not hidden behind a piped link. older ≠ wiser 21:23, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
• I don't think this is such a good idea, but I have come to appreciate the efforts of a few people to "fix" redirects to some already-piped shortcuts. [[Wikipedia:Verifiability|Verifiability]] is better than [[WP:V|Verifiability]]. ([[WP:SPS|Self-published sources]], however, is better than spelling it out as [[Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published_sources||Self-published sources]], for exactly the reason given on this page.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:06, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

alternative name

Nazi broad gauge: alternative name of Breitspurbahn 101.128.178.224 (talk) 03:48, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

total amount of redirects

In "About Wikipedia" page is a sentence: It has 3,838,250 content articles, and 25,903,671 pages in total. I was wondering how many of those almost 26 million are redirects? For example this Wikipedia:Redirect itself has 3 shortcuts, i.e. redirects. It would be okay, if those were only redirects, but they actually have the same article in a different address. So, this "redirect" page in fact uses four times more space than it would without redirects. 85.217.35.190 (talk) 05:25, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

We don't count redirects as articles, and I was wondering about the high number of non-article pages. Special:Statistics, however, does not give this info.Jasper Deng (talk) 05:27, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Redirects are redirects; they do not constitute "the same article in a different address" and do not "use four times more space than it would without redirects." -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:38, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Probably, s/he is concerned about an overhead to search engines. Probably, it is a problem, but not our ☺ Incnis Mrsi (talk) 15:45, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Do not use 4 times more space? Why not? For example: "Wikipedia:Redirect", "Wikipedia:R", "Wikipedia:RDR" & "Wikipedia:REDIR". The address bar reads one of those four respectively but the article is still the same Wikipedia:Redirect. Are you suggesting it just seems the redirect would be on different address? That it is sort of an "illusion"? The Special:Statistics page suggests otherwise: first there is "Content pages" with 3,857,198 pages and just below "Pages (All pages in the wiki, including talk pages, redirects, etc.)" with 26,087,859 pages. Why would the redirects be counted if they aren't there? 82.141.66.232 (talk) 10:49, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

The REDIRECT pages are indeed pages, but they take up only a very small amount of space, not four times the target article's space, and very little server resources to execute. As Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion#The guiding principles of RfD says: "Redirects are cheap." Anyway, the number of article redirects, according to Wikipedia:Database reports/Page count by namespace, is about 5.2 million, so even by that measure it's nowhere near four-fold. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 12:54, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Edit request on 10 January 2012

Please change de:Weiterleitung to de:Hilfe:Weiterleitung. While a point can be made that the existing page will eventually lead to the German help page as well, it should not be required to read about HTTP redirects just to bring an alternative title in line with its common usage.

93.198.216.251 (talk) 00:55, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. Done. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:45, 10 January 2012 (UTC)