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Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Henrygb (talk | contribs) at 17:27, 20 March 2005 (→March 20: fanning). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

For other meanings of rfd see RFD (disambiguation)
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Sometimes, we want to delete redirects. (If you are here because you want to swap a redirect and an article, but are not able to move the article to the location of the redirect, please use Wikipedia:Requested moves to request help doing that.)

To delete a redirect without replacing it with a new article, list it here. It isn't necessary to delete a redirect if you just want to replace the redirect with an article: see How do I change a redirect? for instructions on how to do that.

If you think a redirect page should simply be deleted, you have to do two things.

First, please insert {{rfd}} at the top of the redirect page. (Note that a bug causes any text in the lines that follow the #REDIRECT line to be discarded, so do not put it there. If the {{rfd}} is on the same line as the #REDIRECT, but after it, the redirect continues to work, so that people clicking on links to it will not see the warning message unless they choose to view the redirect page itself. Only if the {{rfd}} is inserted before the #REDIRECT will people see the message that warns that the page is being considered for deletion.)

Second, list the redirect to be deleted at the bottom of this page, in this format:

Please comment on existing entries as shown above. Also, please make sure to leave a blank line between listings, to make it easier to find the end of the entry, so that comments are easier to add!

Please sign and date all contributions, using the Wikipedia special form "~~~~", which translates into a signature and a time stamp automagically. You can make the → symbol by typing →.

To list multiple redirects in a single request, please use this format:

  • redirect #0 → article #0
  • redirect #1 → article #1
  • .
  • .
  • redirect #N → article #N
  • Delete because... ~~~~
    • Opinion #1 ~~~~
    • Opinion #2 ~~~~

Again, please make sure to leave a blank line between listings, to make it easier to find the end of the entry, so that comments are easier to add!

When should we delete a redirect?

You might want to delete a redirect if one or more of the following conditions is met:

  1. The redirect page makes it unreasonably difficult for users to locate similarly named articles via the search engine. (see meta:searches and redirects for proposals to lessen this impact)
  2. The redirect might cause confusion. For example, if "Adam B. Smith" was redirected to "Andrew B. Smith", because Andrew was accidentally called Adam in one source, this could cause confusion with the article on Adam Smith, so it should be deleted.
  3. The redirect is offensive and/or POV, such as "Joe Bloggs is a Loser" to "Joe Bloggs", unless "Joe Bloggs is a Loser" is discussed in the article.
  4. The redirect makes no sense, such as "Pink elephants painting daisies" to love
  5. It is a cross-space redirect out of article space, such as one pointing into the User or Wikipedia namespace.
  6. If the redirect is broken, meaning it redirects to an article that does not exist, it can be deleted immediately, though you should check that there is not an alternative place it could be appropriately redirected to first.

However, avoid deleting such redirects if:

  1. They have a potentially useful page history. If the redirect was created by renaming a page with that name, and the page history just mentions the renaming, and for one of the reasons above you want to delete the page, copy the page history to the Talk page of the article it redirects to. The act of renaming is useful page history, and even more so if there has been discussion on the page name.
  2. They would aid accidental linking and make the creation of duplicate articles less likely
  3. They aid searches on certain terms.
  4. You risk breaking external or internal links by deleting the redirect. There is rarely a reason to delete historical CamelCase links.
  5. Someone finds them useful. If someone says they find a redirect useful, they probably do. You might not find it useful - this is not because the other person is a liar, but because you browse Wikipedia in different ways.
  6. The redirect is to a plural form (or to a singular).
  7. The redirect is from an old article subpage which has been moved to a top-level page, particularly the various standard country subpages.

For example, redirecting Dubya to George W. Bush might be considered offensive, but the redirect aids accidental linking, makes the creation of duplicate articles less likely, and is useful to some people, so it should not be deleted.

See also: Policy on which redirects can be deleted immediately, and /Precedents for precedents that are followed with regards to redirects.

Notes for admins doing requests

Note: When you delete an entry from this page, please make sure to put in the edit summary for that deletion a message indicating i) the name of the removed entry, and ii) the date it was placed here (i.e. the header it was listed under). This makes it easy for people looking through the page history to find when a particular request was dealt with; since this page gets so much traffic it can otherwise be a lengthy binary search to track something down.

Per policy, pages need to stay here for at least a week before they are deleted, unless they are one of the five kinds of candidates for speedy deletion (non-existent pages, user pages, move targets, recent uncommon typos, or vandalism). If a request is already somewhat older than a week, it has almost certainly been left for a reason (usually to try and spur further debate, or to try and reach rough consensus), so be cautious about deleting such entries.

Note: Sometimes a redirect has history, and the history is significant - i.e. contains information about the addition of text. (This often happens because someone did a cut-and-paste "move", instead of using the "Move this page" button.) Never simply delete the redirect page, which we need to keep for copyright reasons. There are two ways to deal with such pages.

For cut-and-paste moves, the "right" way to handle them is to merge the history into the appropriate page, using the procedure outlined here. This is a slightly fraught procedure, which on rare occasions doesn't work correctly. Once done, it cannot be undone, so don't pick this option unless it's definitely the right one for the case at hand.

Another option, useful for pages which were merged (for example), is for redirect pages with significant history to be archived into a talk namespace, and a link to them put into an article's talk page.

If you delete a redirect, don't forget to delete any accompanying talk page.

When you remove an entry from this page because people decided to keep it, don't forget to remove the {{RfD}} tag from the page (alas, this has to be done manually). It's worth periodically checking either here and here to see if any pages missed this step. Checking either of these regularly has the side-benefit of finding pages where people added the {{RfD}} tag to the page, but didn't realize they needed to edit WP:RfD as well.

Holding pen

Some redirects cannot be deleted because of a temporary software limitation. They are listed here until the limitation is removed and they can be finally deleted.

December 12

  • Cornell Hangovers : Target of Redirect does not exist : Target is: Cornell University Glee Club
  • Cornell University Hangovers : Target of Redirect does not exist : Target is: Cornell University Glee Club
    • (Offstage cursing and gnashing of teeth.) The first use to redirect to the second, which used to have content. The second was later turned into a redirect to a third article, one that was later deleted for copyvio. I'd just restore the content on the second, except... that one was VfD'd, but I can't find any record of the discussion on Wikipedia:Archived delete debates/May to Jun 2004, which is the relevant time period. Bah. Maybe I'll just restore the content, and let someone VfD it properly this time. Noel (talk) 00:18, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • Delete Masterhomer 21:51, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • Delete both. Unlikely that the historical revisions would survive VfD and no one has done anything to this well over a month. jni 15:21, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • Been busy with WP:AN; I'll try and get to these soon. Noel (talk) 18:54, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)


Current list

January 4

  • All redirects in the MediaWiki namespace. -- In the past, a number of non-system messages were placed into the MediaWiki: space. This included what have now become templates in the Template namespace, as well as a number of other items (VfD votes were held there for a very short time). All of these non-system messages have long since been moved to the Template: space, leaving hundreds of redirects. Unfortunately, because of this, whenever the User:Template namespace initialisation script runs after an upgrade, it re-moves a lot of items and readjusts all the related links. Non-admins cannot fix these errors and double-redirects, because the entire MediaWiki: space is specifically protected. In order to avoid problems in the future, simplify maintenance, and make Special:Allpages more useful, I propose deleting all of those redirects. This will ensure that no items, other than the internal system messages, will be left. A mostly-comprehensive list of links is available at Wikipedia:All pages in the MediaWiki and Template namespace and Wikipedia:VfD votes in the Template namespace. This is a major undertaking, so let's get a lot of support for it before moving ahead. -- Netoholic @ 21:05, 2005 Jan 4 (UTC)
    • As much as I understand it (I spent a while looking at all this stuff, but I'm still not sure I'm 100% up to speed on it all) this sounds like a good idea to me. There are too many pages to do them by hand, though - I assume some sort of bot would be used? Is the bot going to check that nothing links to any of those redirs, that they don't have any history, etc, before ditching them? (I hereby volunteer to process by hand any which fail those tests.) Noel (talk) 14:35, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)
      • The namespace initialisation script too care of changing all "MediaWiki:" links to "Template:" for those that were moved to templates. As for your other question, theoretically, these should have no edit histories beyond what was done to re-point them in the case of a Template: getting renamed. I am not sure a bot solution would be safe, but I could generate a project page with links that would help the deletion project, should we have garner the support to do so. -- Netoholic @ 17:47, 2005 Jan 7 (UTC)
      • Well, from my brief look, it's going to be one heck of a lot of links, to do it by hand (even with a project page with pre-created links). I would think it would be safe to bot-delete any that i) are redirects, ii) have no links to them, and iii) have only one entry in the history. That would leave the rest (if any) to be done by hand. (Do you know of any cases where use of a template doesn't result in a link to the page? AFAIK, they all do, which means any without links are unused.) Noel (talk) 19:58, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

January 9

  • Template:All messages (no redir), MediaWiki:All messages (no redir) -- At some point, the documentation for various "templates" was kept at MediaWiki:All messages. This documentation has been moved quite a few times, but now these two redirects are left over. Delete as clutter in these specially-tasked namespaces. -- Netoholic @ 09:01, 2005 Jan 9 (UTC)
    • Sounds good to me. Noel (talk) 15:07, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • I re-targeted these to places that did what their names suggested they would. They each had a number of pages that linked to them, so maybe we want to keep them? Noel (talk) 03:07, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)
      • Yeah, they've been retargeted quite a few times before, but my suggestion to delete is that they don't have a purpose with respect to the namespaces they are in. I can fix any pages that link to them directly. -- Netoholic @ 16:48, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

February 4

  • Gundam Seed Episode 1 → Cosmic Era episode list - I'm not sure whether to list this here or VfD. It was a very small article, since merged into the redirection, but doesn't seem to warrant its own existence as a redirect. 132.205.15.43 05:50, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • This one has history - need to check to see if it was used to prepare an article, if so cannot delete, will have to archive. Noel (talk) 13:52, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • PHASE-01 → Cosmic Era episode list - I'm not sure whether to list this here or VfD. It was a very small article, since merged into the redirection, but doesn't seem to warrant its own existence as a redirect. From appearances, orignally it was a copyedit of Gundam Seed Episode 1. 132.205.15.43 05:56, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • Ditto for this one. Noel (talk) 15:22, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

February 7

  • Stub → Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub. Self reference as well, and, if deleted, will allow for moving of Stub (disambiguation). — Itai (f&t) 13:05, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • I'd recomment redirecting Stub to Stub (disambiguation); see User:Jnc/Disambiguation for my reasoning as to why. Noel (talk) 14:59, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
      • Much better practice would be to delete Stub and move Stub (disambiguation) to that title. -- Netoholic @ 19:11, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)
      • Why not make it easy to see when someone has linked to what's actually a disambig page? Noel (talk) 20:10, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • Also, this page has a zillion pages linking to it; some of them undoubtly expect the existing linked meaning. Noel (talk) 15:02, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
      • Yes, I know. Still, Wikipedia:Avoid self-references. — Itai (f&t) 15:12, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
      • Sure, but since you're one moving the deletion, you get to organize fixing them! :-) I already did my bit on the ones above... Noel (talk) 16:59, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
        • I need to do this? Whatever happened to the gnomes? <sigh>. Nice job on the first four. I took care of everything I could regarding stub - of course, I cannot modify text in the Talk: and User: namespaces. — Itai (f&t) 18:08, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
        • Actually, I think it's generally agreed to be OK to edit User: and Talk: pages to fix links that would otherwise be broken. Certainly, when we were deleting all the redirects from the main namespace to User:, we sure edited a lot of User: and Talk: pages! Noel (talk) 18:03, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
          • Are you sure I won't be lynched if I edit User: and Talk: pages? If I am, do you promise to continue my legacy? (Never leave edit summaries. Mark all edits as minor.) — Itai (f&t) 23:02, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • Still has lots of links to it, most presumably being to the old meaning. Noel (talk) 02:30, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

March 6

  • Nelli Kim/Temp → Nelli Kim. Remnant of a copyvio repair. I'm amazed there isn't a csd case for this. —Korath (Talk) 10:48, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)
    • I think these can be deleted right away as continuation of copyvio process, like orphan talk pages can be deleted if the article they are for has been deleted per VfD. If it was listed 7 days in WP:CP and no one objected to the moving of /Temp over article, then we IMHO already have enough consensus for trivialities like this. jni 12:41, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • Wikipedia:Be bold and edit CSD to include this case too, and see if it sticks. Personally I think it's a good idea. Noel (talk) 13:40, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

March 9

  • Chewing → Mastication --Djanvk 03:55, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • This listing is confused. Chewing is an article, listed to be merged with [Mastication]. So far, so good. However, once the content is merged, we need a redirect at the other one, otherwise someone will just re-create the page. In addition, we need to keep the edit history of the one that was turned into a redirect, for Wikipedia:Copyright reasons. Noel (talk) 21:11, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Random page → Special:Randompage - An especially unpleasant cross-namespace redirect, since it doesn't leave the "Redirect from..." line. See also Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Random page. —Korath (Talk) 12:06, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)
    • Already left a 'delete'-vote to the VfD page. jni 12:48, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • I'm curious, why is this 'considered harmful'? The user asks for a random page, and gets exactly that: a random space. It's not really cross-namespace, as special:randompage once more returns to a normal namespace. Radiant! 14:38, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)
    • I agree with Radiant. The user gets what he asks for (something random) and it doesn't really cross namespaces. Jonathunder 07:03, 2005 Mar 15 (UTC)
    • I think the issue with "cross-space redirects" is that we have people who take copies of the database - but only of the main article namespace. So for them, a redirect to Special: wouldn't work. What might work is to make the redirect to a URL for Special:Randompage, like this, which will work from anywhere. Noel (talk) 00:02, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

March 12

  • Pobyeda (automobile), Pobeda (automobile), GAZ M20 Pobeda → GAZ-M20 Pobeda. Redirects that will never be used. There's disambiguation page, Pobeda, that links the correct article, a link from GAZ and a redirect from GAZ-M20; that should be enough. --DmitryKo 08:07, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • Keep all - harmless redirects. The last one in particular is a likely typo. -Sean Curtin 18:54, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)
      • I created these redirects in a process of moving the page to the proper name. Yes they are harmless but useless as well, because no single page references them and they are not likely to be used in a search (and I don't expect anyone here to know correct model index for a 60-year old Russian car). --DmitryKo 09:02, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
        • I think that's more of a reason for keeping the redirects than for deleting them; if the proper name is not commonly known, sensible near-misses ought to redirect to the actual name. -Sean Curtin 23:54, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
          • Believe me, noone is gonna search for something plus ' _(automobile)' . DmitryKo 11:19, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

March 13

  • Sesame_Street/Characters → List_of_Sesame_Street_characters. Legacy sub-page previously replaced by a standard page; subpages in the article namespace no longer allowed as a matter of Wikipedia policy. There are no links to this page. Courtland 05:43, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)
    • Sub-pages aren't, but current policy is to keep redirects left over from the old (circa 2002?) organization, which used sub-pages. (Let me hasten to make clear that I'm not big on this, and if it gets changed, I would be happy to see it changed, but I don't dislike it enough to put the energy in to getting it changed. More important fish, etc...) Noel (talk) 13:33, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

March 15

March 16

  • Given name etymology -> Wiktionary. We should NEVER redirect an unsuspecting reader to another location. RickK 07:26, Mar 16, 2005 (UTC)

March 17

  • Redirects with non-existent targets: The most recent batch of the Wiki Syntax Project has found roughly 360 redirects with non-existent targets. These have been listed on 4 pages: 000, 001, 002, and 003. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 22:51, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • 360!! Holy smoke!! It'll take me days to delete them all. Oh well, guess I'd better get started! Noel (talk) 23:58, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
      • Sorry, honestly not trying to stress you out, I just though it would be better to leave a message here than not. Most of these redirects don't seem to have any history (beyond their creation), and a fair proportion of them look to have been created by anons, so hopefully those can be speedy-deleted. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 04:39, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
      • I was just being funny. No problem, I'll crank through them whenever the Wikipedia's responding quickly. I see that some of them are just typos in the target, etc, and can be fixed, so it's a little more complex than just nuking the whole shebang. Noel (talk) 11:38, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

March 19

    • I like the second one. As self-references, I suppose they all should go. Maybe Palindrome_emordnilaP would pass. -- User:Docu

March 20

  • Fanning -> Tabuaeran. Inappropriate redirect. A redirect of Fanning atoll would be all right. RickK 01:03, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)
    • I came across an orphaned article Fanning. I saw no need for a vfd debate since it was a combination of something about Tabuaeran and something POV about the Passenger Services Act. So I redirected it and created a new Passenger Services Act stub. What is "inappropriate" about that? --Henrygb 11:13, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
      • The problem is not with what you did, but with the fact that "fanning" is ambiguous - it's also the present participle of "fan". Hence Rick's comment about "Fanning atoll" being an OK redir. Noel (talk) 14:12, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
        • That would not justify deletion (which leads to history loss and the possibility that someone would recreate the original page) - it would instead justify a disambiguation page.--Henrygb 17:27, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • O'Hare, Chicago → O'Hare International Airport. Inappropriate redirect. The former is one of Chicago's Community Areas and the later is an airport. Although the airport is located within the community area, the community area includes residential and business areas beyond the airport proper. A sandbox stub of the proper page for the O'Hare, Chicago article can be found here. Gerry 4:01, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • As discussed in the second para of the instructions here, there is no need to delete this, since the redirect can be edited directly - see How do I change a redirect? for directions on how to do that (if you need them). Noel (talk) 14:19, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
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