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Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Jnc (talk | contribs) at 16:17, 2 January 2005 (→January 2: Humboldt U done, moved). 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 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.

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.

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)

October 13

October 29

  • 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)
    • Done. -- User:Docu
    • This appears to have been a mistake. A Google search shows "Fujiwara family" is more common (2,080) than "Fujiwara clan" (915). In addition, the Britannica has them under "Fujiwara family". Noel (talk) 16:35, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
      • If so, the article should be updated, then moved back. -- User:Docu

November 17

  • SEGA M8 → Sonic Team — The developer Sonic Team was formerly named SEGA AM8 not SEGA M8. K1Bond007 02:38, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)
    • SEGA M8 has some editing history on it; will need to figure out how to handle that. Please do not delete until that is handled. Noel (talk) 04:01, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

November 22

  • Infatuation -> Limerence: a real word redirects to a neologism... something's wrong with that picture. --Joy [shallot] 01:10, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
    • Yeah, it is a neologism, but it's one that is i) not super new, ii) not found only on Wikipedia, and iii) seems to have gained a certain amount of usage - Google shows 1,330 hits, some on serious pages (e.g. Yahoo health pages). Now, maybe the article should be at Infatuation, with a redir from Limerance, but if so someone needs to look at it to make any needed changes in the article text. Noel (talk) 14:49, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
      • Regardless, I'm not arguing against the existence of the article on Limerence. I'm saying that infatuation should be relegated to non-existence (and an automatic link to wiktionary) because it's not the same thing. --Joy [shallot] 14:52, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
      • That's fine with me; I'll delete the redir in a little bit. Noel (talk) 23:55, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
      • Now that I look at it, there are a number of pages which reference infatuation, and this page seems to describe that as well as limerence. Should we try and make a real infatuation article (perhaps using in part e.g. the last paragraph from this), or what? Noel (talk) 17:42, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 12

December 20

  • DEC Windows → Common Desktop Environment
  • DECWindows → Common Desktop Environment
  • Delete because these redirects are completely unnecessary. [...]AlistairMcMillan 12:02, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • I didn't get this - there's no mention of DEC at CDE. What's the rationale for that target? Noel (talk) 18:00, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
      • Hmmmm ... There seems to be some sort of connection between these two things, but it's really hard to know exactly what it is from the Common Desktop Environment article ... on this page it says "Digital provides an easy way to interact with the Digital UNIX operating system - the graphical user interface called DECwindows Motif. The DECwindows Motif interface is based on two industry standards: the X Consortium's X Window System and the Open Software Foundation's Motif user interface" (emphasis added by me). And in the article it says CDE is based on Motif, and has a picture of "DECwindows CDE on OpenVMS 7.3-1". But it's still not really clear what the connection is. Is DECwindows an instance of CDE? Is DECwindows Motif an add-on that makes it a CDE? Is DECwindows CDE an add-on that makes it a CDE? -- Nickj (t) 00:44, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • Keep for now until someone writes an article specifically on DEC Windows (as CDE contains info on DEC Windows and the two are very related). -Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley 07:10, 2004 Dec 22 (UTC)
    • Yeah, but it doesn't follow Wikipedia:Redirects#What needs to be done on pages that are targets of redirects?, which says: we try to make sure that all "inbound redirects" are mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs of the article. Except for the photo caption (which I didn't even see), DEC is not mentioned in this article at all. (So I don't understand your comment "CDE contains info on DEC Windows".) We need to either upgrade the article, or ditch the redirects. Noel (talk) 14:29, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 25

  • Whitey -> The Man May cause confusion with other uses of "Whitey," especially the notorious gangster. 68.169.219.4 17:52, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • Sounds like it should be a disambiguation page. Noel (talk) 00:24, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 28

  • de ja vu-->déjà vu. Unlikely and uncommon spelling form. Lacrimosus 02:27, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • I disagree. Déjà vu is hard enough to spell that people need whatever help they can get. 24.60.189.129 00:32, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • Joseph O'Malley --> Edwin O'Malley. Incorrect article name erroneously created. (Help me! This should be titled "Edwin O'Malley" not "Joseph O'Malley". I made a mistake but dont know how to fix it. Can this be deleted? I already added the same file under the correct name.) - Nunh-huh 05:35, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • Well, Joseph is the guy's real middle name, and if this person (who presumably knows something about them) got it wrong, others might too, so I'd say "keep". If it ever becomes an problem (e.g. a clash with someone else) we can revisit the issue then. Noel (talk) 12:00, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
      • That's silly. There already is a clash (look at "what links here"). This man is not Joseph O'Malley, and there are other men who are Joseph O'Malley. The redirect needs to be deleted. - Nunh-huh 23:46, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
      • One link, from another article by the same user - and the other Joseph is someone who, from the look of them, may well never get an article. So it's hardly the end of the world. But sure, no reason not to ditch this, then. Although... does anyone know if Edwin ever went by his middle name? (Lots of people do - I do.) If so, Joseph needs to become a disambig page. Noel (talk) 12:44, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 30

December 31

January 1

January 2

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