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Wikipedia: Redirects for deletion

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

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, please use Wikipedia:Requested moves, which is the page for 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 {{rfd}} to be ignored - i.e. the redirect continues to work, so that people clicking on links to it will not see the warning message - if the {{rfd}} follows the #REDIRECT.)

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

  • this redirect → that article -- Delete because... ~~~~
    • Opinion #1 ~~~~
    • Opinion #2 ~~~~

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!


Deletion Tools
 

Articles {{vfd}}
Categories {{cfd}}
Copyvios {{copyvio}}
Images {{ifd}}
Mergers {{merge}}
  {{mergefrom}}
  {{mergedisputed}}
Redirects {{rfd}}
Page moves {{move}}
Speedy {{delete}}
Patent {{nonsense}}
Templates {{tfd}}
Undeletion
Unfree images {{pui}}
  {{PUIdisputed}}
  {{nonfreedelete}}
  {{unverified}}
  {{unknown}}
{{Move to Wiktionary}}

Deletion policy
Deletion log

Deletion Humor
Extreme
People

Contents
1 When should we delete a redirect?
2 Notes for admins doing requests
3 June 19
4 July 25
5 September 22
6 October 5
7 October 13
8 October 19
9 October 21
10 October 29
11 November 17
12 November 22
13 November 26
14 December 3
15 December 4
16 December 5
17 December 6
18 December 7
19 December 8
20 December 9

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 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).

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 four kinds of candidates for speedy deletion (non-existent pages, user pages, move targets, or recent uncommon typos). 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-past 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 andhere 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

[[Ĺs<caron>rÄ«mÄ?lÄ?-sĹ«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_>ĹšrÄ«mÄ?lÄ?-sĹ«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)
    • keep, and make it a {{R with possibilities}} or a short stub. There is no reason for a link to be read if there should be an article with this title. dab 15:14, 15 Nov 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 19

  • Matthew Smith (programmer) redirects to Matthew Smith The redirect was created by a move; I don't believe it is necessary any more. - Mike Rosoft 14:09, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • I have just fixed all pages which link to the redirect. - Mike Rosoft 18:55, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Keep. No reason to break inbound links. anthony (see warning) 19:06, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Keep, and encourage people to use the long version. The short name may need to be a disambig page someday. Noel 22:35, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Either way, keep the redirect. This makes it easier to sort the links/disambiguate later. -- User:Docu

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)
    • Certainly keep. Feel free to make into a disambig, though. anthony 警告 19:38, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)
    • Made it a disambig. Sorry it took so long. --DiGiT 20:44, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

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 referenceinfatuation, 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)

November 26

  • AIDS Kills Fags Dead. Prevent google-bombing, and other obvious reasons.CheeseDreams 20:18, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
    • How often are we going to have the same discussion? "Obvious" reasons? What's that? It's no longer the title of the article (which I would prefer), and now you object even to a redirect?! <KF> 23:52, Nov 26, 2004 (UTC)
    • This topic has been discussed to death at Talk:AKFD and subpages, particularly Talk:AKFD/redirect. The end-result (with votes) on a whole raft of similar redirects seemed to be to keep only this one, and Slogan 'AIDS Kills Fags Dead'. I don't see much point to arguing it all over again yet one more time. I would particularly concur in this particular case, because of #avoid #2 above - it prevents the creation of a new article. With the increasing number of new editors here, that's a real issue. Noel (talk) 12:55, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 3

  • SPCC → St. Paul's Co-educational College
  • St. Paul's Co-ed → St. Paul's Co-educational College
  • St. Paul's Co-ed. → St. Paul's Co-educational College
  • The article refers to a local primary / secondary school in Hong Kong. Delete because it causes confusion and not a well known acronym beyond a small circle. -Hlaw 10:48, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • (Redirects are still being created. See [1]) -Hlaw 09:11, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • Delete. They are well-known in Hong Kong but only used orally. -wshun 10:59, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • I did notice them being re-created (after they were deleted early, outside policy). What we will do if they are re-created, if a consensus develops to delete them, is unclear - since the users doing so are not logged in, they could wind up being blocked, of course. I will turn SPCC into a disambig page anyway. Noel (talk) 15:19, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 4

December 5

  • Missing redirect Kissinger Associates, Inc. → Kissinger Associates. The redirect doesn't exist, there is a Kissinger and Associates but that has a notice not to confuse them with Kissinger Associates. I assume the redirect is for the later and not the former. Sortior 07:04, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)
  • Missing redirect Krasin (icebreaker) → Krasin. Which is apparently a Russian icebreaker in a museum but there is no article.Sortior 18:37, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)
    • Left warning messages on the Talk: pages of the users who created them. Give them a few days, then we can either delete the entry ('cause the target is now there), or delete the redir. Noel (talk) 21:06, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 6

  • Hmm, it turns out there's buckets of old redirects from the : to the User: namespace. Could we have a single strawpoll on deleting them (or redirecting if the user in question has an article about them)? All links should be fixed when deleting ofcourse. --fvw* 13:29, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)
    • These can be deleted without any discussion/waiting. See Wikipedia:Candidates_for_speedy_deletion#Redirects reason #2. That would only apply to ones with no significant history, of course; ones with history would need to be dealt with more subtly. Noel (talk) 20:39, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
      • Ah, good point. Glad you're willing to help out, there's quite a few: User:Tim Starling has made a list. A massively daunting task if you fix all the links from archived talk pages, perhaps we should just take the position that people reading that far back in talk pages should expect some link breakage. Any objections? --fvw* 21:57, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)
      • My position is that when deleting a redirect to a page which has been moved, we really are under an obligation to find the things that link to that redirect, and fix them to point to the new location. The thing is that once the redirect is gone, it might be ambiguous where the now-broken links refer to, and nobody can come along later and fix the broken links, because the information they would need to do so has been deleted. Really, it's not much work - it's moving the redirects which have a lot of history which is a pain! Noel (talk) 15:29, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • Don't forget the numerous links from talk pages .. -- User:Docu
      • Sorry, didn't understand that? Noel (talk) 15:29, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • Be careful when deleting these redirects. Originally all user pages were in the main namespace and these were later moved to the user namespace by cut and paste. Many of these redirects thus contain invaluable history of Wikipedia's earliest months. - SimonP 06:18, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)
      • Concur - that was what I was alluding to above (with "ones with history"). Noel (talk) 12:54, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 7

December 8

  • Dosso → Dosso Dossi — Confusing, Dosso is far more commonly used for the city in Niger (which does not yet have an article). Warofdreams 13:29, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • You can just start editing the redirect page (click on "Redirected from Dosso" and then click on "Edit this page", and insert text on the Niger city; we don't need to do anything for you to be able to do that. (You might want to add a This article is about the city in Niger; if you were looking for the artist, see Dosso Dossi to the top of your new article, though.) Noel (talk) 21:34, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 9

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