Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Cburnett (talk | contribs) at 05:09, 7 February 2005 (February 6: Added Deep Impact (motion picture) -> Deep Impact (movie)). 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

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 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

  • 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)

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

  • Historiography of the Pauline Epistles -> Authorship of the Pauline epistles. Note that historiography is writing about history rather than of history. Historiography is meta-analysis of descriptions of the past. The analysis usually focuses on the narrative, interpretations, worldview, use of evidence, or method of presentation of other historians. As such I don't believe this is an appropriate redirect to that article. - Ta bu shi da yu 04:37, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • Wow, that's an awfully fine hair to split! To me, discussions over authorship are just one aspect of the historiography of a writing (which is clearly subtly different from the historiography of an event); i.e. they are meta-discussions about the writing. So I would say that it's basically on-point, unless someone wants to write about e.g. the history of various translations, at which point it would properly become a separate article. Noel (talk) 15:07, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
      • Well, that's my point. Authorship discussions are only one part of the historiography of a writing! So it's not appropriate to redirect to a more specific article that only covers one aspect of that topic. - Ta bu shi da yu 05:23, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
      • Yes, but do we have any other content at all on the historiography of the Pauline Epistles? If not, then the redirect serves a useful purpose, which is to send anyone looking for content on the HofPE to whatever material we do have on that subject (albeit on a limited subset of that topic). It's not like the canonical bad redirect ([Emperors of Foo] - [Foo]) which sends you to an article which covers a lot more material, other than the topic of the redirect. About the only argument I can see for ditching this is that it will stop links to HofPE showing up as a red link (and thereby inciting someone to write it). Noel (talk) 12:45, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • 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)

January 29

  • Brian WeikleJeopardy!. A former Jeopardy! contestant who had some success. He appears nowhere on the Jeopardy! entry. Someone looking for information about Mr. Weikle will not be aided by reading about the history of the televion show he appeared on. 128.61.70.49 22:21, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • Article used to have content; restored content, feel free to list on VfD as non-encyclopaedic. (I'd do it, but I have too much else to do.) Noel (talk) 18:49, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

January 31

February 1

February 2

February 4

February 5

February 6

  • Bush regeneration DELETE - I wanted to delete the redirect that was at Bush regeneration so as to move Bush Regeneration, but it was pre-Dec 2004 so couldn't be deleted. So I moved it to a highly deletable name and am listing it here for when old pages can be deleted again. I've performed the page move that was originally wanted - David Gerard 21:33, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Deep Impact (motion picture)Deep Impact (movie) I've edited several thousand movie articles and this is the *first* time I have seen "(motion picture)" used for disambiguation. It had two uses which have since been changed to use "Deep Impact (movie)". On the near-zero chance the redirect is used it could set someone off to think that it's the way to disambiguate movies. So on that level, I see it as having a larger negative impact than positive use. Cburnett 05:09, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)