Wikipedia talk:Redirect

See also: Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy/redirects, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Redirect, and Wikipedia:Article wizard/version1/Redirect

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) § Tool for bypassing redirects in see also sections

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) § Tool for bypassing redirects in see also sections. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:44, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Redirect from mainspace to catspace?

National Interfraternity Music Council was previously deleted, however the member groups are still in a category by that name, is it reasonable to redirect the mainspace page to the catspace page of the same name, as that would give the most useful information, which groups are in the NIMC?Naraht (talk) 14:33, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

• It would, yes, as category-space is still a reader-facing namespace, but first check if there aren't any better mainspace targets. J947 † ^edits 00:32, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Categorizing redirects

Honestly, ACATR is as clear as mud to me. I'm looking for some guidance/consensus about which kinds of redirects warrant categorizing; I've seen a lot of them being categorized with regular article categories, most recently stuff like this (and the preceding edit), which seems superfluous to me. (I couldn't find anything useful in the archives for this talk page either.) Thanks, Drmies (talk) 15:49, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

It has been discussed before, but not necessarily on this page - see for example Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Shipwrecks#Categorization issue and Wikipedia talk:Categorizing redirects/Archive 2#categorizing redirects as though they were articles (others are available on request, I normally search for Honey Lantree). For the specific example given, the redir Cuddles (Happy Tree Friends) is a redirect from a character to a TV show in which that character appears. So, Category:Happy Tree Friends is valid because Cuddles is a character in the TV show Happy Tree Friends. The others (Category:Anthropomorphic rabbits and hares, Category:Fictional mass murderers, Category:Television characters introduced in 1993, Category:Teenage characters in television, Category:Male characters in animation, Category:Male characters in animated series) are all valid because Cuddles is each one of those but Happy Tree Friends is none of them. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:43, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:MIXEDCAPS" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Wikipedia:MIXEDCAPS has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 August 15 § Wikipedia:MIXEDCAPS until a consensus is reached. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 19:38, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

NOTBROKEN needs to be moderated

WP:NOTBROKEN contains some bullshitty language like "It is almost never helpful to replace [[redirect]] with [[target|redirect]]" that is just some random editor's highly subjective opinion/bugbear incorrectly expressed as a hard fact. It's also written as if it's a hard policy prohibiting redirect bypasses, but the community very plainly does not accept it as such, so it should not be written in such a prescriptive and absolutist way.

It's a clear fact that many, many editors do in fact replace redirects with piped direct links; the very existence of "bypass redirect" and "bypass redir" as stock phrases on WP could not be possible if it were not a common and accepted practice. It is the purpose of our guidelines to describe best practice, not to try to change well-accepted practice into some other behavior pattern someone wishes it would be.

Direct links (piped as needed) are objectively better than redirects for our readers, for a number of pretty obvious reasons. Just three of them, and there are probably more: 1) They reduce the "surprise" level of using the site (redirs are not "invisible" to the reader, and can even be confusing, especially if the material at the very top of the target doesn't use the exact same name/term that the person clicked on). 2) When you look at where the link is pointing (mouse-hover over the link, in most browsers), it tells you the full path of the link to page you'll end up at (or think you'll end up at); when this is correct instead of a redirect the user doesn't expect, then it again reduces surprise/confusion. 3) People change redirect targets all the time, often without cleaning up afterward; usually they are constructive changes, e.g. to a new article instead of to a section, or to a better section at article A than the section at article B that the redirect originally pointed to; but with a zillion editors, there will always be unhelpful instances. Then we also have the issue that a great many redirects are unprintworthy (common typos, etc.).

All that said, yes, we do have a worthwhile underlying principle here: making redir-bypassing changes as the sole reason to make an edit, and doing a lot of that, is apt to be taken as WP:MEATBOT behavior, and annoys watchlisters. Do it as part of a more constructive edit (fix some typos, impove some citations, etc.). While if it were not often permissible to bypass redirects, the very phrase "bypass redirect" would not be stock WP terminology; on the flip side, if it were always, for every imaginable reason and case, okay to bypass redirects, then NOTBROKEN would not have been written (even in a better, less "my way or the highway" version). The main reason for that guideline is, basically, "don't fight about it", and it should be rewritten with that in mind. And it needs conforming cleanup at WP:NOPIPE, which makes the patently false claim (clearly inspired by this excessively strident and opnionated version of NOTBROKEN) "It is generally not good practice to pipe links simply to avoid redirects". In reality, it is clearly considered good practice by the majority of our community of editors, because they usually do write with pipe (why would we even have pipes, really, if not to use them?), and very often update material to do that when it wasn't written that way orginally.

PS: The only actual rationale offered in favor of not bypassing redirs is, at NOPIPE: "the number of links to a redirect page can be a useful gauge of when it would be helpful to spin off a subtopic of an article into its own page". But in over 17 years here, I have never encountered a single split case where such an idea was a determining factor; usually the redir stats are not consulted at all. Articles are usually split based on length and detail considerations, as well as a show of independent subtopical notability. And the title of the split article will be subject to WP:COMMONNAME and the other WP:CRITERIA, not determined by redirect wording.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:39, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Personally, I've always thought a redirect is fine, provided we don't pipe to a redirect. If we have [[B|A]] but the article is actually at C, then that's no good. An article at C that is linked as a redirect to A is fine. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:55, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

• Keep as is. I'm afraid I sharply disagree with Stanton on which form is "objectively better". Unpiped links to redirects are objectively better. It has relatively little to do with counts to redirects, and much more to do with the fact that piped links hide the semantics of the link inside syntax that is not visible at the level of the rendered page. This is a software anti-pattern that should be avoided. It's similar to why symbolic links are preferable to hard links on a filesystem.
  I also disagree on which version violates the least-surprise principle. Piped links violate least-surprise worse than links to redirects, because they take you to a page with a different title than the one you were expecting, without the notice that you were redirected. --Trovatore (talk) 23:25, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

In my experience, while I've run into a number of editors that replace a redirect with a pipe to the target, it's been generally inexperienced editors who mistakenly believe that a redirect is the the sign of a problem or an inefficiency, neither of which is true. Simply using the redirect has a number of advantages, including simplification of maintenance (i.e., if Jane Actor is a redirect to her only role as the star of Notable Film, and then she also gets another noteworthy role and her redirect is turned into a page for her, then we actually want all those links to Jane Actor to go right to that page, and not be piped to Notable Filme.) So this seems to be addressing what is at the very least good advice and really seems to be standard practice among experienced editors. Really, the only problem I have with NOTBROKEN is the name NOTBROKEN, which often gets misunderstood as "don't change things" by people who see it mentioned but don't actually read what it links to. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:26, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

• Keep as is. The pipe links tend to make the wiki mark-up much messier - whereas the non-piped links are clear, concise and don't district the editor. Eg, I see many editors using the clumsy [[gasoline|petrol]] when [[petrol]] works perfectly fine via a redirect and is so much easier to edit. It's true that sometimes a redirect gets changed badly. It's also true that when information is shifted to a new home (eg, a section being split into its own article) then we have all those old links that are now hard to find and replace with the new link and therefore the piped link is now wrong. As an example, last year I created a new article Toyota dealerships (Japan) by moving information from the Toyota article. Previously, articles linked directly to Toyota#Japan with piped links. It took me months to find all those links and move them over to the new page via redirects. This could have been practically automatic if the links were via redirects in the first place. In short, links should be to the subject being discussed, not to its current (and changeable) location.  Stepho  talk  00:02, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

To clarify Stepho's example (if I got that right), Toyota Store, among others, used to redirect to [[Toyota#Japan]]. After a dedicated article about Toyota's dealership in Japan was created (Toyota dealerships (Japan)), Toyota Store's target was updated to [[Toyota dealerships (Japan)#Toyota Store]], and that was simple enough. The problem is that all unnecessarily piped links to Toyota Store: [[Toyota#Japan|Toyota Store]] then needed to be individually fixed to point to the new article, whereas had the redirect [[Toyota Store]] been used in the first place, all this link fixing would not have been necessary. --Deeday-UK (talk) 13:42, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• Keep as is. I particularly like Stepho's take: "Links should be to the subject being discussed, not to its current (changeable) location". casualdejekyll 01:13, 27 August 2023 (UTC)
• Keep as is. NatGertler is precisely right that we WANT to keep the links to a redirect rather than have a direct link to whatever more general article might currently have relevant information on the topic. And I agree with others that the markup is much cleaner without excessive piping. When an article is moved to a new title, then sure it is no big deal to have some "bypass redirect" edits -- though in that case to replace the previous direct link with the updated direct link rather than replacing with a piped link. older ≠ wiser 02:05, 27 August 2023 (UTC)
• Keep as is. Apart from the redirects being cleaner, the unnecessary piping is a damn nuisance. I have} many times created new articles from redirects or changed the target to a more appropriate one and unnecessary piping gets in the way, and ran into the same issues as Stepho. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:48, 27 August 2023 (UTC)
• Change. I recently came across an editor who is changing valid article links to redirects, based on just this issue. The Banner talk 12:43, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

  Can you post some examples please? Changing links so that they conform to current guidelines doesn't sound like an issue to me. --Deeday-UK (talk) 13:51, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

  This edit on Battle of Britain, this edit, here, here and these edits on Winston Churchill. Most edits with a claim of MOS:NOPIPE. The Banner talk 15:03, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

  That's what I thought: I could have made 95% of those edits myself. I always edit source code, and filling it with things like [[Hugh Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding|Hugh Dowding]] when [[Hugh Dowding]] does the job just as well (and has other advantages too), does not help build a better encyclopedia, in my view. -- Deeday-UK (talk) 16:29, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• Status quo per Stepho. Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 13:34, 27 August 2023 (UTC)
• I'm afraid I don't quite see the reason for this apparently very opinionated, emotional rant :) In my experience, most newbie editors don't know much about piped links and don't generally work contrary to the sensible description in the guideline. I noticed "bypass redirect" edits a few times, reverted them with this simple explanation, and never had an issue with it. We have plenty of issues identifying bad primary redirects already, I really don't see why we should stop encouraging people from doing things in a way that avoids extra clerical work. --Joy (talk) 16:06, 27 August 2023 (UTC)