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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Nought (talk | contribs) at 20:12, 31 October 2004 (→‎Sub-Commission to study with a view to formulating guidelines...). 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
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Sometimes, we want to delete redirects. If you think a redirect page should be deleted, please insert {{rfd}} at the top of the page and list the redirect at the bottom of this page. Note that a bug causes {{rfd}} to be ignored if it follows #REDIRECT.

List articles to be deleted in this format:

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

Please sign and date all contributions, using the Wikipedia special form "~~~~", which translates into a signature and a time stamp automagically.


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When should we delete a redirect?

To delete a redirect without replacing it with a new article, list it here. This isn't necessary if you just want to replace a redirect with an article: see meta:redirect for instructions on how to do this.

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 soure, 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.
  7. If the redirect is a placeholder for an article which we need, and which has been set (theoretically temporarily) to redirect to the closest reasonable match (e.g. Irish cream → Cream liqueur). Deleting such redirects causes references to the article to show up in red, so that we know that we need to create it.

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.

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: Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion#Redirects for policy on which redirects can be deleted immediately, and /Precedents for precedents that are followed with regards to redirects.

Useful notes for admins doing requests

Note: Sometimes people come here because they want to swap a redirect and an article, and the redirect has history, and the history is significant (usually 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 fix such page pairs. The "right" was is to merge the histories, using the procedure outlined here. Alternatively, simply swap the two. This leaves the bifurcated history, but has less chance of causing problems. (To do this, move one to a temporary name, delete the redirect left there, move the other across, delete the redirect left there, and then move the first one to its new name. You will then need to delete the redirect left at the temporary location, and fix the redirect to point at the article - it will be pointing to itself at this point.)

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 Category:Redirects_for_deletion or 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.

June 19

[[Ås<caron>rÄ«mÄ?lÄ?-sÅ«tra]] -> Srimala sutra. RickK 06:07, Jun 19, 2004 (UTC)

  • Delete the entry with cur id:736339, if it's still there. How does one link there ( [[<i_>Å&#154;rÄ«mÄ?lÄ?-sÅ«tra</i_>]] ) -- User:Docu
    • Special:Whatlinkshere/Srimala_sutra has nothing linking to it, which suggests 736339 doesn't exist. Angela. 10:30, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)
      • I just ran SELECT cur_title, cur_text, cur_namespace FROM cur WHERE cur_id = 736339
        on a more recent version, and it still shows up. --User:Docu
      • Indeed. The current text of the oddly-named entry is "#redirect [[Srimala Sutra]]" (note, different capitalisation from RickK's initial entry). Alas, no 'what links here' entry there either. TB 13:48, 2004 Oct 29 (UTC)

July 25

  • [[L. S<caron>arounová]] This redirect page should be deleted because the S caron in the title is not ISO-8859-1 (and thus won't show correctly on some machines, such as Macs). As for the "mistake", my understanding is that the redirection entry would work only for Windows users (which do include the S caron in their ANSI character super-set). I'm not completely clear yet on how redirects work with non ISO-8859-1 characters. Let me be clear: the proper name of the astronomer in question is "L. S<caron>arounová". Links within pages could be in either long or short ("L. S<caron>arounová") form, with or without accents (so there are eight link forms total). The target page cannot be titled "Lenka S<caron>arounová" because the S caron isn't kosher. What's the correct solution? Urhixidur 12:12, 2004 Jul 25 (UTC) (moved here from vfd by Graham ☺ | Talk 22:23, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC))
    • Just to be clear, the suspect redirect here is Lenka Šarounová, and the current page title is Lenka Sarounová. Both versions work fine for me, but if the accented S is going to cause people problems, someone needs to go through and correct all the backlinks, regardless of whether the redirect is kept. - IMSoP 23:31, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
      • This issue will cure itself as soon as Wikipedia in English switches to Unicode. Susvolans 10:17, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
      • Well, don't hold your breath: I understand the French 'pedia's conversion was far from painless, and they have a fraction of the data this wiki has. So we may be "pending better conversion tools" for some time yet, I think. Besides, the conversion won't necessarily revive dodgy page titles like this; it may end up making them even more dodgy, for all I know. (And I just realised, the links don't seem to render right now). - IMSoP 14:32, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

September 22

  • Irish Cream needs to be red so someone will write an article; shouldn't redirect to one brand. Gehirn
    • It could be redirected to Cream liqueur instead. sjorford 13:08, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
    • Yes, but do we want an article about Irish Cream specifically, as opposed to cream liquers in general? If so, deleting it would be the right move. Noel 21:59, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

October 5

  • Jirga > Loya jirga. It's like redirecting Parliament to House of Commons. The Loya jirga is one instance of a jirga--in fact, not even the only one, but the (hiearchically) "highest" such body--in Afghanistan. Village jirgas have also been in the news in Pakistan.—iFaqeer | Talk to me! 20:39, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
    • You're absolutely right. Delete. (Side note: the best solution would be to get a Jirga stub set up with a link to Loya jirga. The trick is writing more than a dicdef, though. I'll see what I can do over the next day or so, unless anyone else wants to take a crack at it?) • Benc • 08:10, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
      • Gone. Please create a dicdef though. - Ta bu shi da yu 12:30, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

October 13

October 18

October 19

October 20

I'm currently working on an automated link suggester, which takes the text of articles, and suggests possible good links. One direct flow-on from this has been to identify redirects with bad titles ("bad" as in the way those words are actually used in articles bears no correlation to what the redirect page is about). Here are the main ones so far; Also I've never listed anything for deletion before, so please forgive me if these are bad suggestions: -- Nickj 00:17, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

  • The Director redirects to Osama Bin Laden - Too general; Not linked to by anything; Used commonly in standard English with a different meaning; Only a redirect.
    • Nuke. Disambig. Noel 01:17, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Change to disambig page. Include the film of that name (ISTR). Rich Farmbrough 12:57, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
      • I have no problem with the page being about the movie, but there are currently 58 redirects (!) to Osama Bin Laden, excluding this one - and this one seems by far the silliest. Furthermore I'm sure that many people in a whole variety of different situations are known as "The Director". I think it should just be about the movie. -- Nickj 23:00, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

October 21

  • McGuffey → McGuffey, Ohio - McGuffey is ambiguous (the city or the author?) and really should lead to a disambiguation page. DiGiT 01:36 GMT.
    • Keep. You can edit the redirect to make it a disambiguation page. (To access it, click on the link to it, find the blurb at the top of the target page that says Redirected from McGuffey, and clock on the link there.) Also, please be so kind as to make a stub about the author; I would if I had the least idea who this person is. --Smack 01:17, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • There already is a stub for William McGuffey. Why redirect to a disambiguation page when the search could automatically point there?
    • I am coming to the conclusion that all pages of the form "{foo} (disambig)" should be redirected to from the main foo location, with no article actually at foo, not even the main meaning, because it enables us to quickly check for articles which have linked to foo, without the writer checking to make sure they got the right meaning of "foo". I see so many instances of this with disambig pages that it's not true (I regularly 'clean' disambig pages I created, and I do other ones all the time - I just spent a couple of hours last night fixing all the links to Cracker). When you have a popular page like tree, it's impossibly painstaking to go click on every entry in "What links here", and look through the page to find the reference, to make sure it's legitimate. And before you ask, the reason for not putting the disambig page at foo is that only people who really want the disambig meaning will link to foo (disambig), and all links to foo will probably be wrong. And yes, I know a jillion pages already use the old way, but that's no reason to keep making more of them. Still pondering what to do about the existing ones. Noel 16:27, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

October 27

October 29

  • Yoshi Kawaguchi → Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi --DMG413 01:35, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Unnh, could you please explain why? (FWIW, the first is a common dimunitive - not that I object to deleting it, but I'd like to know why.) Noel 16:50, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
      • Ooops, I'm dense, target doesn't exist. Didn't see that, was looking at an edit window! Noel (talk) 13:47, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Oppose. I recommend to keep it as a redirect and write a new article under the latter one. --Aphaea 20:36, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
      • Go ahead! I looked to see if there had been an article that was deleted, but there wasn't. If not, will go away - see rule #6 above. (Have left note on user's talk page.) Noel (talk) 13:47, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • Attila József → Attila Jozsef -- As a redirect, it should be deleted, so the article with the wrong title Attila Jozsef can be moved to its place. In other words, the redirect should work just inversely (since accents are not usually omitted from the titles, unless they are missing from the Western character set, which is not the case here). - Adam78 11:42, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Argh - Attila József was a redirect to Attila Jozsef with no history until it was edited to add an {{rfd}} tag, so Attila Jozsef could simply have been moved to Attila József. Now a candidate for WP:RM? -- ALoan (Talk) 12:40, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Actually, most articles in the Wikipedia are filed without accents. Check out Talk:Montreal for an example. I suspect most English-speaking people (this is the English Wikipedia) don't even know how to type them - I don't (off the top of my head). Noel 16:50, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • Fujiwara clan -> Fujiwara family; to move the latter to the former (Fujiwara clan has two revisions). It is inaccurate to call it family. After moving, I will put Fujiwara family again as a redirect.--Aphaea 12:20, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • This is probably the right move; I'll check some of my reference books. Noel 16:50, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

October 30

  • Slipknot → Slipknot (band) -- The band Slipknot takes its name from the knot, whose page is located here: Slipknot (knot). I feel it would be more accurate if the knot was located at Slipknot with a small disambig up top (This article is about the knot, slipknot. For the band, see Slipknot (band).) - Vague Rant 07:19, Oct 30, 2004 (UTC)
    • Hmmm. I guess the knot is the most common use, so it would be OK to put the knot page there. Noel (talk) 16:05, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

October 31

  • John Robinson Pierce --> John robinson pierce for a page move. The content is at the improperly capitalized article, which can be moved to correct capitalization once the redirect is deleted. SWAdair | Talk 06:03, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Fixed. Moved over redirect. — David Remahl 10:16, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Yes, but what do we do about the lowercare redirect? I would say delete, as we don't as a rule have lower-case redirects for pages about people. Noel (talk) 17:35, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)
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