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Mis-spelling policy

I'd like to suggest that we try and come up with a policy about mis-spelling redirects (instead of arguing each one out separately).

My position is that for any word, there are a multitude of potential mis-spellings, and I see no reason preferentially treat one misspelling (which someone has accidentally created on Wikipedia) over all the others (which haven't been).

Not that I have a blanket rule against variant spelling links, as you can see from Thutmose (which you can find explained here).

I feel that if you happen to have some evidence that a particular misspelling is a common mis-spelling, or alternatively that it's an alternative spelling which is in non-trivial use, then that's an OK reason to keep it. If nothing else, it will prevent someone from creating duplicate content when they think something "isn't there".

However, the bulk of mis-spellings come from a dropped, or typoed character (e.g. "entaglement" or "entanglrment" for "entaglement"), and I think those should be delete without debate.

Noel 16:29, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I agree with you here - 'common' misspellings are good redirects, 'random' misspellings just clutter up the database. Which of course leaves the question of which are 'common' and which 'random'. Andre Engels 10:01, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Whether a misspelling is 'random' or 'common' could be found using the Google test. Jay 09:17, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Right ;)

As long as we don't have another tool, I'm not quite sure what we'd use instead. BTW there is a project to expand these redirects further, see User:Daniel_Quinlan/redirects.

We could build a List of redirects of misspelings similar to Wikipedia:Links_to_disambiguating_pages and generate a list like Wikipedia:Disambiguation_pages_with_links. This way the redirects will be put to some use. -- User:Docu

What does this mean, "clutter up the database"? When Wikipedia is slow, it's not because of large redirects. If a misspelling redirect exists, then that is prima facie evidence that the word is ; it may be mispelt again. We all have better things to do than to delete things that do no harm and clearly do a slight amount of good. This is why it's been Wikipedia policy from the beginning (or at least since I arrived in 2002) to not delete mispelt redirects, and a good policy it is too. -- Toby Bartels 01:22, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Let's ignore the technical argument, because clearly the database can deal with it. Let's focus instead on the "why single out some typos for special condideration" argument. You say it's "evidence that that word is sometimes misspelt in this way", but that's not evidence that it will ever be mis-spelt that way again. In my original proposal (above), I suggested that we keep typos for which there is evidence (e.g. from Google) that they are common (and we could set a number threshold here, so that it's not a subjective decision). But what about the others? Would you be opposed if I started a campaign to add dozens of potential misspellings to every article in the database - every one for which I can find one instance in Google - i.e. evidence that the "word is sometimes misspelt in this way"? What, other than the accident of it having been typed once here, distinguishes these existing but not common mis-spellings from others? Noel 15:00, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I propose deletion of redirects created by random spelling errors. Jay 08:19, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I think the best solution here is a technological one. The software should make available to us the number of requests made for pages with a given title (regardless of whether or not the page exists). Then we can evaluate the creation or maintainance of misspelling redirects based directly on how often they are requested by readers. This would also be handy for identifying "high-profile" articles - ones that we have to watch the content of carefully to avoid creating a bad impression.

Derrick Coetzee 01:17, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I also think it would be reasonable to perform a simple search, such as that done by spell-checkers, through the article names for very close alternatives when there is no match. This would eliminate the need to create many of these redirects manually, including many of the less frequent ones.

Derrick Coetzee 01:27, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Let's not create more work for ourselves, please

I disagree strongly with the notion that redirects that are uncommon mispellings should be deleted. Why?

  1. The database and web server can handle it. Easily.
  2. If someone mispelled it once, there is at least a chance that someone else will. So what if it's a 0.01% chance? Better safe than sorry, and leaving the mispelling as a redirect costs us nothing, aside from a few meager bytes of disk space and bandwidth (see previous reason).
  3. It is a supreme waste of time to dicker over whether a mispelling is "common enough". There are countless other ways we could be spending our time to improve Wikipedia.
  4. The established deletion policy already frowns on deleting mispellings.

By its very nature, RfD doesn't get a lot of traffic. Most vandals aren't clever enough to redirect Amazingly fat and stupid dog-faced fart-sniffer to the article on their least favorite person in the world. Let's accept the fact that there's not a whole lot for us to do on RfD, and stop trying to make more work for ourselves. • Benc • 08:14, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Good points. There is no lack of clarity in the existing policy of keeping spelling redirects, nor was there any lack of thought or discussion put into establishing it. The onus is on those who now want to change (or ignore) it to justify this. Andrewa 12:43, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Subvert the system (a bit)

Am I right in thinking that a REDIRECT is simply an article which begins #REDIRECT [[somewhere else]] and that any further content is ignored? If so, why not simply add some sort of explanation to a REDIRECT? You could then have something like: 

Coblers
#REDIRECT [[Cobblers]]

Common mis-spelling

which would then show up on a search. HTH HAND --Phil 09:26, Mar 11, 2004 (UTC)

I like this idea. Actually, we could even do one of those {{msg:<foo>}} thingys for it. Maybe even one for typos, and another for genuine alternative spellings? Noel 15:05, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

You mean something like Mediawiki:RedirectAlternateSpelling which could read something like "this is an alternate spelling: do not delete"? --Phil | Talk 15:47, Mar 12, 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, exactly - except I'd use names which were shorter, like "typo" and "altsp", or something. Noel 16:48, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I like the idea as well. I tried to combine it with another suggestion and use the redirects for sorting, e.g. people by surname, see Wikipedia_talk:Redirect#Redirects_for_sorting. -- User:Docu

A policy on redirects to nowhere

I would like to have a policy on the deletion of redirects to nonexistent articles. Some are leftovers from deleted articles, some are redirects made from a template, and some are just the usual bits of anarchism.

In some situations, the redirect and the nonexistent article have similar titles. When one or both of the pages are created at some point in the future, there will be a discussion of if the two are the same thing (and if they're the same, which should hold the article and which should be the redirect). It seems unfair to bias that discussion against the page currently redirecting before either article has been created.

As such, I recommend that all redirects to nonexistent pages be deleted, unless the redirect page has links to it and there already exist a scheme for that redirection (e.g. 2004 Canadian election -> Canadian federal election, 2004 and 1878 Canadian election-> Canadian federal election, 1878). --Ben Brockert 23:17, May 3, 2004 (UTC)

There is a policy. See point 12 on Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion. They can be deleted straight away. Angela. 23:55, May 3, 2004 (UTC)
Oh ah. Thanks for that, I somehow missed it. Perhaps it should be included somewhere in the redirects for deletion area? --Ben Brockert 00:17, May 4, 2004 (UTC)
Yes. I've added it to Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion#When should we delete a redirect?. Angela. 01:19, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Archives

Shoud archive the debates, and, if yes, where should we keep them? As there isn't just that much we could just create archive pages /Archive1 etc. -- User:Docu

I don't think they should be archived. One reason for deleting a redirect is because it makes it harder to search for something. Having the word in the archive could cause just as many problems as the original redirect. Another reason to delete it is because the redirect is offensive. In such cases, people are going to want to remove all record of the redirect, not just move the offensive statement elsewhere. Angela. 12:24, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)
It's more for redirect we kept, it may matter (and avoid the same discussion). -- User:Docu
Except for those rare lengthy debates (like the ridiculuous "George Woshingtin" saga), archives should not be kept. It creates more work and clutter. • Benc • 08:04, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I don't think they should be kept; on those rare occasions when it seems important and the redirect was kept, the debate could be put on the Redirect's talk page. [[User:CatherineMunro|Catherine\talk]] 14:53, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
That's a good idea - I'll start doing that. If enough people agree, we can add it to the "admin" section on the page. Noel (talk) 15:48, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Redirects with quotes

Folks, we have about 90 redirects of the form '"article_name"' - that is, the name of an existing article surrounded by double quotes. Examples include "Desolation_Row", "list_of_slovakian_companies" and "All_My_Trials". I'd like to take a reasonably aggressive approach and delete these where:

  • Nothing links to them
  • They redirect to the article of the same name without surrounding double quotes
  • The actual article does not include anywhere in its text its title surrounded by double quotes (this would exclude "All_My_Trials" for example).

I wanted to give folks a few days to think on this and object/comment/offer assistance before I go ahead. - TB 15:47, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)

How do you know they haven't been linked externally? Is there a reason to risk breaking external links by deleting any of these? What harm are they doing? Angela. 20:28, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)
Most look like they've been created by following a red-link that inadvertantly has had quotes inside the square brackets rather than outside (common in bibliographies, lists of film or song titles an such). My initial interest was in scanning for and correcting instances of these red-links to prevent more badly-named aricles appearing. Now that that process is working well, I wanted to remove any remaining examples of quoted titles before some someone decides its a convention and creates more of them. If I limit my removal to those that existed for less than 24 hours (most were moved within minutes) before being moved to an unquoted title will his allay your worries about external links ? - TB 22:21, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)
Not wanting to mislead people into making the same sort of links again does seem a reasonable reason for deletion. I have no problem with ones that were moved the same day being deleted and I don't strongly object to the others. Angela. 00:34, Aug 14, 2004 (UTC)
This list has grown substantially since 8/14/04 and now has hundreds of articles, the Naming Conventions policy [1] has been expanded that using characters for emphasis only is to be avoided. I'm going to found a new cleanup project for these articles, any objections before starting? Xaosflux 05:19, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Access Counts?

Somebody suggested that the software should provide information on how often a page is accessed, but I think that might have privacy implications and is a bad idea. [originally unsigned by 66.32.123.183 08:47, 16 Aug 2004 ]

Also, it's too easy to artificially inflate access counts with some distributed scripting and wasted bandwidth. • Benc • 22:02, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Out of process deletion

Please see User_talk:Sam_Spade#ha ha. User:Zanimum appears to have deleted my Gnome Chompy redirect out of process. Some assistance, please. Sam [Spade] 10:40, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Uhh... What's a "Gnome Chompy" and where did it redirect to? Etz Haim 10:57, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
It was a redirect to Noam Chomsky. In my opinion, a pretty poor joke, and trying to defend it as a "misspelling redirect" is plain ridiculous. I rather get the impression that this redirect was created to ridicule Noam Chomsky. Maybe it should have gone regularly through WP:RFD, but somebody marked it as a speedy deletion candidate. It could be argued that it was nonsense... Sam, would you prefer I restored and listed it properly on WP:RFD? Lupo 11:31, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Redirects are for things people might put. Say Noah Chomsky, Nome Chomsky, Noam Chompsky. But "Gnome contains a silent "G". Nobody in their right mind is going to put in a silent "G", in front of Noam's name. My position, as you lamb-baste me as on your talk page, is not "Your position, as I see it, is exclusionary in nature, and rooted in haughtyness and academic argot." No one interested in a particular linguist is going to be as illiterate to completely screw up on a spelling, that far from reality.
While it's not a true gage of all the internet, Overture offers the Search Term Suggestion Tool. Type in a name or phrase, see how many searched for it. 11292 searched for "noam chomsky", 213 "noam chomsky biography", 187 "manufacturing consent noam chomsky and the media", 145 "noam chomsky quote", 83 "noam chomsky book", etc. etc. The misspelling "Noah Cmomsky" was searched for 50 times even. But was "Gnome Chompy" searched for even once? No.
Another gauge is Google's spell check. A search for "Gnome Chompy" pulls up no suggestions, meaning they don't think anyone in their right mind would search for such a thing. And people search with the oddest of terms on Google. The Britney Spears spelling correction system query page lists the hundreds of ways her name has been spelled by searchers. Anyone for her Welsh speaking clone, "Bretniy Spears", or her Indian counterpart, "Pretny Spears". Can't wait for "Brythey Spears" next album. So you see Google redirects even the worst mistakes. Gnome Chompy is beyond the worst. -- user:zanimum
There's 592 ways Google "redirects" to Britney Spears. -- user:zanimum

Redirects in place of needed articles

The point was made to me (and after thinking about it, I concurred) that redirects which are "placeholders" for articles we need, and which are temporarily set to the closest reasonable match (e.g. Sultan of the Ottoman Empire -> Ottoman Empire) should in fact be deleted. That way, we make sure that references to the non-existent article show up in red, so that people know we need to create the page.

It has been suggested that we add this point to the list at WP:RfD#When_should_we_delete_a_redirect, and I think that's a good idea. I'm going to do that "shortly", unless someone has a cogent reason not to (or they have a better reason than the one above as to why we should leave such links :-). Noel 13:47, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Having heard nothing, I went ahead and added this, in this form:
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.
but it has now (some weeks later) been unilaterally deleted.
I would like to point out that I came up with the idea for that extra clause (when we want links to show red) because on a number of occasions over the past couple of months, such as this one and this one people argued that it was better to have a red link, to make it plain that we needed an article. (The "Sultan of the Ottoman Empire" one mentioned above is another case where this argument was made, but I couldn't be bothered to try and find it in the history - however, that's another one.)
Since all the redirects in question were deleted, and nobody responded here nagatively, I thought we had reached rough consensus. I guess not. Noel (talk) 00:40, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The person who deleted that clause cited Wikipedia:Redirects with possibilities as the reason for doing so. I personally don't find the existence of this page a persuasive argument. It's an obscure page, and I doubt most people know about it. Are there really many people who go there, looking for things they have expertise on, that they can write about? And how many topics listed there are not in the expertise of people who do know about it? I think it's much more likely that people stumble across missing articles in the course of their everyday movements around the 'Pedia, and do articles then (just as I did yesterday with DKM Deutschland). So I think the argument that it's better to have red links as a way to get articles written is very persuasive.

Also, if a reader sees a red link, and they want to know more anyway, there's always the "Search" button, so I think the disadvantages of leaving such "close but no cigar" links in place (which is that the article may never get written) far outweighs the advantages (you save somsone having to go use Search). Noel (talk) 00:40, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hm, as it's generally a good idea to provide links to articles covering a topic, rather than breaking links, I removed the recent addition to the "Reasons for deletion" [2]. (Obviously, I should have pointed this out here earlier, my excuses).
To list such redirects, there are Redirects with possibilites and Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:R_with_possibilities (we might want to replace the later with a template based category).
If the redirect is too broad, the (previous/current) pratice didn't exclude deletion [3], (a sample quoted by Noel).
Personally, I think the included sample (Irish cream → Cream liqueur) is a suitable redirect. If we delete all similar links, we just might end up with even more potential duplicate articles and stubs needing coordination or merging. -- User:Docu
BTW Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was in fact deleted and recreated shortly afterwards, just to point to a better article. -- User:Docu

Redirects that go the opposite way

Sometimes an article is written under an obscure name, and a more appropriately-named page is made a redirect. For example, Group 15 element is a redirect to Pnictogen. The former name is rather unwieldly, but the latter is etymologically questionable (see the article) and not approved by the relevant international standards organization. I want to interchange the article and the redirect, but this requires the redirect to be deleted. Is there a policy on these situations? --Smack 00:59, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Such page moves require admin intervention. Group 15 element was once the main page, and pnictogen redirected to it, as can be seen from this old revision. Policy says that the most common name in English should be used, and judging from a few Google searches, pretty much ties "Group 15 element" with "Pnictogen". I think you should at least discuss the move on Talk:Pnictogen first. If there is consensus, I'd be happy to assist you in performing the move (drop me a note on my talk). — David Remahl 01:22, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
In general, we prefer to see the article at the most common name, even if it's not a formal name; according to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names), we're supposed to use "the most common name of a person or thing". We are quite happy to move things around to reach this state. In this particular case, there might be some technical issues relating to histories, but we know how to solve these. The real issue is to make sure there is "rough consensus" on what to name the article, and the admins who do the housekeeping here really aren't experts in this field - indeed, in most specialized fields - to render that judgement. That is why I suggested you take it up on the article's talk page - where the people who do know the field will see it and (hopefully) comment. Noel 02:44, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Point taken. I'll try to be more careful with these page moves in the future. However, I think that dropping a comment on talk: and waiting for a month or two for replies to trickle in is an inconsistent policy. Why should we have to go through this trouble and wait just because there's already a redirect at the new location? I can argue this fact should actually facilitate the process. If I want to move a page from title A to title B and find nothing there, this absence should give me pause: is B really a legitimate name for this entity? On the other hand, if there's a redirect there, that means that someone has already deemed title B common enough that people will look for the entity under the name of B.
You may counter that the author of the redirect could just have well have moved the page from A to B, and the fact that he did not indicates that B is a secondary name for A. There are at least two problems with this assertion. The simplest is that many edits are made by unregistered users, who do not have the permission to move pages. Also, the author may just not have been bold enough (due either to a poor knowledge of the subject or general wiki-timidity) to make the move decision, and opted to redirect instead. --Smack 03:41, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

WP:RM

Now that WP:RM seems to be up and running, do we want to alter the header here to refer people to that page for all redirect deletes which are actually for moves? Noel (talk) 00:34, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Input sought on possible bot that adds redirects

There's a possible idea for a bot for adding "missing" redirects that I've added to the Bots page. Since any bad redirects would end up on WP:RFD, I'd really like to get input from you folks on whether it's a worthwhile idea or not. Note also that many of the suggested redirects would be pluralisations (I've heard Noel speak in favour of adding these, and I strongly agree that plurals often make great redirects). All the best, -- Nickj 09:13, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I think it's a great idea, since I am constantly having problems finding articles when I can't remember the exact name. And the sample output is impressively good. However, I think it's important that it be a bot-assisted process, not a truly automated process. That is, every single bot-proposed redirect should be approved, item by item, by a human before being created. (It's fine if bot then goes to work unattended redirects from a long list of queued-up approved items). My own experiences with any automated process involving text, from simple global search-and-replaces, to grep, to computer-generated indexes, is that anything that does not understand the text it is processing cannot process it reliably. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 16:29, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'm going to "me-too" this. The output is very impressive. However, looking through the list (it's been a couple of weeks, sorry I didn't find the time to comment back then), most I saw looked reasonable, but a few were clearly wrong. Multiply that by the large numbers involved here, and that's a lot of bad links to fix.
I know the numbers look really daunting, but I'm not sure if they'd really be that bad in practise, if you did a little bit each day, and got a number of helpers. E.g. assume you can do one every 10 seconds, that's 6 a minute. (Although you won't get that response time out of the Wiki at a lot of times, so maybe the 'bot to actually insert them is the way to go.) Do it for 30 minutes before your brain explodes, that's 180. Get 5 helpers (I would volunteer to do some, albeit not a full "shift"), that's 900 a day. At that rate, they'll be done in about a month. Noel (talk) 13:16, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I think the sample output can be improved a bit more (there are some redirects suggested that already exist, and I managed to clobber some data with a bad database query) - that's why these lists are just proof-of-concept. Additionally if the same redirect is suggested more than once on a page, then currently each of those suggestions get counted, but I think it would be better if each suggestion only counted once per page. Additionally the cut-off levels could be raised a bit. All of these should improve the quality more. However, manually checking each and every redirect is a simply a deal-breaker for me. If I reran it with more care, I'm guessing there would be maybe 25000 redirects. Assuming 1 second to think about each, working continuously, with no breaks or lapses in concentration, or any breaks at all of any kind, then that's at least 7 hours of non-stop incredibly tedious work to process all of them. For someone doing this on a volunteer basis (just like everyone else here), that's way too much to ask of me. I'm happy to put the lists out there and let others check them and tell me what they think should be removed, if someone else wants to check every link. But I certainly wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to do this, given that I wouldn't do it myself. Basically, I can filter the output in any way you like (raise the cut-off, get rid of specific entries, etc, etc), but there's an upper time limit I'm willing to spend on this. I'm really looking for either a "yes", or a "yes with specific filtering conditions" (e.g. cut-off criteria, don't link to this specific thing, etc), or a "no". All the best, -- Nickj 00:56, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

OK, the idea of automatically adding these by bot is dropped, but the lists have been recreated and tidied up, and placed on this Missing Redirects page, together with instructions. The lists are broken up into blocks of 5 suggestions, so that they are not overwhelming, and so that people can do as much or as little as they like. Additionally, I've added an "Easy Preview" function, so that these can be added in 2 mouse clicks, without typing or copying/pasting anything at all. Hopefully this should provide a good solution of software doing the laborious searching, with humans deciding whether the suggestions are any good or not. All the best, -- Nickj 06:09, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wow, that sounds great. Let me go do a few!
Now, where can we post this, to get other helpers? Noel (talk) 13:16, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Tweaking "reasons to keep/delete"

Some of our "reasons to delete/keep" list might need some tweaks. For the "delete" list, my eye catches the following:

  • 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.

Guidelines for redirects says: we try to make sure that all "inbound redirects" are mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs of the article; I'd like to include some sort of reference to this on RfD, and this seems like the right place for it.

  • 5 - It is a cross-space redirect out of article space, such as one pointing into the User or Wikipedia namespace.

This instruction seems to be inconsistent with contemporary practise in many well-accepted cases, e.g. Admin, which redirects to Wikipedia:Administrators, not to mention RfD, which redirect here! See also Talk:VfD and Talk:Vfd, where discussion explicitly is in favour of keeping VfD as a redir to WP:VfD. I don't understand what the dividing line is between x-space redirs to Wikipedia: that we keep, and those we ditch - is it only the most notable ones, or what?

This seems to have been clarified; with a very few limited exceptions (and all the ones I know of are initialisms, such as VfD), x-space links to Wikipedia: from the main space have been disposed of. Noel (talk) 14:02, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

On the "keep" side:

  • 7 - The redirect is to a plural form (or to a singular).

I'd like to expand this to include other forms of speech (e.g. verb tenses and participles, etc); Translating → Translation - is an example.

Do people have any command and/or suggested wordings? Thanks! Noel (talk) 13:34, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree with these proposals, except for #7 in the case of normal plural forms with "s". I just wrote this as a new chapter below before I noticed your contribution. Would it be OK to merge our two chapters?
Sebastian 05:56, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)
Nah, just leave it where it is. As to the plurals, see comment below. Do I take your comment to mean, though, that you are in agreement for other forms, such as Translating → Translation, where one cannot do the "add extra characters outside the link" trick? Noel (talk) 14:02, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Duplication of text from Wikipedia:Redirect

See "When should we delete a redirect?" Wikipedia:Redirect lists a similar list by the same name, but with some minor differences, e.g. Charles/Daniel instead of Adam/Andrew. Is this duplication intentional? Is it a problem? If so, which page should hold the authoritative text? Just wondering. -- Wisq 21:58, 2005 Feb 9 (UTC)

The duplication has been there for ever; it was here when I showed up several years ago. I don't like it because of the possibility of version skew (if you note, there's an HTML comment x-reffing and warning people to update both lists if they update one). AFAIK, Wikipedia:Redirect is the authoritative copy. Noel (talk) 14:02, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Automagically

Judging from the HTML comment, someone really wanted to keep the word "automagically" on this page. I removed it because A. The Jargon File article to which the word links contains no mention of the word "automagically"; and B. The Jargon File site itself [4] is not very user-friendly when it comes to looking up individual definitions. So I'm not sure of the point of including the word as a link to Jargon file when the target article is not really helpful.

If that person is still really attached to leaving the term "automagically" on Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion, then I suggest either A. Linking the word directly to the external jargon file definition like so: Automagically, or B. just put the word in quotes. I think having the word here is silly, which is why I removed it rather than doing one of the above two things. Taco Deposit | Talk-o to Taco 15:23, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, there's an even better solution, which is to fix it so that there's a little pop-up that shows up with a definition when you wave the mouse over it, e.g. on WP:AN. I'll copy that trick over to here. Noel (talk) 15:53, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
While that's a keen solution and I'll have to remember it, note that there are entries on wiktionary for automagic and automagical. (There is, sadly enough, a better dicdef for automagic here, though I've just vfd'd it.) —Korath (Talk) 14:48, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
Ah. There didn't use to be a definition there (or here). Now that I look at the one on Wiktionary, it's totally bogus; I'll have to fix it. Noel (talk) 14:02, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

When should we delete a redirect?

There are two kinds of redirect pages I think should be deleted, but they are not mentioned in the list:

Name with plural "s" added

The term biped forms - like most English words - the plural by adding "s". Someone (who presumably wasn't aware we can create links like "[[biped]]s") created a page bipeds. This page was listed on User:Nickj/Redirects/redirects-066.txt as requiring attention. To avoid this sort of distraction, wouldn't it be good if we deleted all such pages?
Sebastian 05:45, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)

This was extensively discussed (I forget where) before we decided to create all these redirects, and the consensus was that they are an OK idea. So, I think this one's a non-starter. Noel (talk) 14:02, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Undefined Hapax Legomena

The page aggridant redirects to Abraham Maslow, who coined the term and was apparently the only significant person to ever use it. The term is not discussed on that page. It was briefly mentioned, but not really defined, there temporarily, but that mention got deleted on January 1, 2005. Obviously, since its creatin in 2003 nobody felt that this article was worth even a definition of the term. I think it would be better to delete such redirects, because they mislead readers.
Sebastian 05:45, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)

See above. Noel (talk) 14:02, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Sorry, I can't "see" this because there is no link to the discussion you mention. Please provide at least one good reason why a redirect from "X" to a page that doesn't even contain the word "X" should remain in place for years. — Sebastian 08:30, 2005 Mar 25 (UTC)
Actually, upon reading the following section "only delete if there is no history" I see one possible reason. But I think this can be easily solved more appropriately by e.g. renaming the page to "Obsolete Pages/X". — Sebastian 08:33, 2005 Mar 25 (UTC)

Only delete if there is no significant history

The GFDL requires Wikipedia to credit authors. Wikipedia does this by preserving the history of articles. But it cannot do this if the article is deleted. What sometines happens is that articles are merged, and one is turned into a redirect to the other. That is fine, though the edit summary on the new longer article should say that is what has happened. The problem comes if the redirect is then deleted, because the history of the source of some of the information is lost. --Henrygb 21:25, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I do the vast bulk of the deletes here, and I always carefully check histories to find things like this (and others, such as trying to bypass VfD by turning something into a redirect, and then listing it here). So no need to worry! Noel (talk) 23:23, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Redirects from very long titles

We recently came across some very strangely named articles on WP:VFD (one with a 200-char title, another with ellipsis in it). Would it be useful to do some automated searches on cases like these, and nominate them here as inappropriate?

For example, Mr. Munchausen: Being a True Account of Some of the Recent Adventures Beyond the Styx of the Late Hieronymus Carl Friedrich, Sometime Baron Munchausen of Bodenwerder.

Radiant_* 14:27, Mar 31, 2005 (UTC)

Redirects with non-existent targets

I've reverted an apparently un-discussed change to case #6 of "when should we delete a redirect", as well as minor changes to a number of other parts of the policy. The old version (now restored) was:

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.

Michael Hardy's version is

DO NOT delete a pre-emptive redirect merely because its target does not exist and no page links to it. Sometimes such a page may redirect a common misspelling or a common misnomer to a correctly spelled or correctly termed title, thereby avoiding a later situation where two articles, one with an incorrect title, are being worked on by Wikipedians unaware of each other's work. If a page has no value as a linkless pre-emptive redirect page, it should be listed as a candidate for deletion, NOT as candidates for speedy deletion, so that its merits or demerits can be soberly deliberated upon. But first, you should check that there is not an alternative place it could be appropriately redirected to.

Was there a discussion of this I somehow missed? --Carnildo 04:58, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax/redirect-target-000.txt, apparently. —Korath (Talk) 05:31, Mar 26, 2005 (UTC)
I've attempted to summarize the issue, and eventually posted a link to it at the Village pump. AFAIK, that's all the discussion that's ever been held about this. (That, and a zillion edits scattered all over, and finally reverted.) --Fbriere 05:37, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

In view of the list of exceptions in the paragraph beginning with "However...", I've revised item 6 in a way that is really just a changed in emphasis and I hope will avoid some rash deletions-without-due-deliberation. It now reads as follows:

  1. 6. # If the redirect points to an article that does not exist and does not help avoid the accidental creation of duplicate articles, it can be deleted immediately; but first you should check whether there is an alternative place it could be appropriately redirected, and whether any of the exceptions noted below are applicable.

Michael Hardy 03:40, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This is not a mere change in emphasis. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:28, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
How so? Formerly it said delete if the target doesn't exist, but then said but first, consider a list of various exceptions. I've simply incorporated part of that list of exceptions into the original statement. You need to read carefully. Michael Hardy 22:12, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
You added a new exception that is not generally agreed-upon. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:23, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
NO, I DID NOT ADD A NEW EXCEPTION. That exception was already noted in the list of exceptions below. I simply moved it to where it would be seen by people like you who have not carefully read the list below. Michael Hardy 22:26, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Quote it, because I do not see any such thing. Speedy deletion of redirects case one: "They refer to non-existent pages. Before deleting a redirect, check to see if the redirect can be made useful by changing its target." The cases following are independent and do not build upon this. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:09, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Here's the quote from Wikipedia:Redirects_for_deletion:

However, avoid deleting such redirects if:

....

2. They would aid accidental linking and make the creation of duplicate articles less likely

That's been there all along. Michael Hardy 00:49, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

That isn't about broken redirects, it's a general statement primarily aimed at things like plurals and variant spellings. Broken redirects are still specifically speedily deleteable. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:25, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

And you have been saying that redirects from plurals and alternative spellings to singulars or more standard or less confusing or otherwise better spellings should be considered "broken" unless the target page already exists. Obviously a redirect from an incorrect spelling or a misnomer or a plural to a correct article title, which does not yet exist, can avoid later creation of duplicate articles! And that's what that long-standing policy says: we should not speedily delete a redirect to a non-existent target if it may help avoid later inadvertent creation of duplicate articles. Why are you so stronly opposed to such a simple precaution against inadvertent creation of duplicate articles, whose authors cannot work together because they are unaware of each other? Michael Hardy 02:45, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I can live with either version of the rule (delete all, or keep ones that will prevent duplicate creation), and do not want to get in the middle of this! I always tried to apply the "delete redir to non-existent target" rule lightly anyway... Noel (talk) 12:55, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Sub-page redirects

I keep getting asked about these, so I'm going to post this here for general interest. (Like I have said several times, policy at the moment is to keep them, but I wouldn't mind seeing this changed, and these old names deleted, but I'm happy to keep them too.)

I wasn't around for the "keep sub-page redirects" discussion, it was before my time; it happened back when they decided to get rid of sub-pages. I added keep #7 when I was told of the policy by some other admins (when a case came up - I think it may have been Cambodia sub-pages, IIRC). I spent some time researching where the relevant policy is, and also spent a while looking for discussion about redirects at the location of old sub-pages.

You can find the policy at Wikipedia:Redirect#Renamings and merges. That text was added in this series of edits by User:MyRedDice, back in the summer of 2003.

Although I found a lot of debate about sub-pages, and some about keeping redirects to pages that were moved, I didn't find much specifically about the keeping of redirects to subpages. (It may have been discussed as part of a discussion on RfD about a specific entry, but if so I don't know which one; I looked in WP:Rfd/Precedents and didn't see anything.) There was general discussion of keeping URL's which used to work for a page continue to work, so that links to Wikipedia pages stored off-site continue to work, and that seems to have been applied to sub-pages.

PS: Here's the removal of the case which prompted me to add that entry to the keep list. Note that there's no discussion of the policy here; both of us just seem to accept it. Noel (talk) 14:07, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Heck, we like keeping old redirects around so much that we still have old CamelCase ones, like AmericA. grendel|khan 15:00, 2005 May 11 (UTC)
was there a point to this edit?! Thryduulf 15:37, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

For those interested in this history of how sub-pages were eventually discarded as an organizational scheme (which happened around the start of 2002, as best I can make out), see this page. If anyone knows of a better reference on the topic, please add it. Noel (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Stupid parentheses

In the list I found an interesting item: Ted Koppel (alum), which redirects to Ted Koppel, always has, and is not linked to from anywhere but here. In other words, it's a nonsensical redirect because nobody on Earth is going to try to look up Ted Koppel (alum) instead of just going to Ted Koppel. Is it permissible to speedy when there is absolutely no reason whatever for this kind of "disambiguation"? - furrykef (Talk at me) 08:18, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, if it was a plausible disambiguation (e.g. "Albert King (blues guitarist)", I'd say we should keep it. But "(alum)"? Gubble. Still, what's the rush, that we need to speedy it? Just chill, it'll get nuked, trust me! :-) Noel (talk) 06:34, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Articles for deletion?

I've been seeing a lot of instances recently where people turn articles into redirects, and promptly list the redirects here. To me, this feels like an end-run around the way we normally delete content pages through the VfD process. Unless someone objects, I propose to modify the instructions here to say that in such cases, the original content will be restored, and the request removed from RfD, without further notice. Noel (talk) 04:00, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Why not notify the nominators? It would be little trouble and might prevent more hassle. --MarSch 12:05, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You probably need to distinguish between something as you describe, and the case where the page is moved to a better title and then the original title RFDed because it is meaningful but means something else. The first may involve a history loss - the second does not. --Henrygb 12:09, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Agree completely; I never meant to include the case you describe (which happens all the time, BTW). Noel (talk) 18:12, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

CamelCase redirects

CamelCase redirects have been the subject of debate as to whether or not we should continue to keep them. This poll is an attempt to see if we should change the current policy for dealing with them.

CamelCase redirects are a relic of the early days of Wikipedia, when CamelCase the only syntax whereby links from one article to another could be done (see Wikipedia:CamelCase and Wikipedia for more). For single-word article titles, capitalization of the last character was the standard arrived at. Support of the Free Link syntax for links ([[target article]]) only arrived in February 2001, and articles were rapidly renamed from CamelCase names to regular names, leaving redirects behind.

The current policy (see WP:RfD#Keep #4) is to keep them (to prevent links, bookmarks, etc to them outside Wikipedia working). You can see more about how (and why) that came to be at #Sub-page redirects above (sub-page and CamelCase redirects were dealt with in the same way, so all comments applying to one apply to the other); Talk:ModulE also contains a discussion of the issue. Noel 16:36, 27 July 2005

OK, this has been running for about 3 weeks now - long enough to get a sense of the community - which is that the community is pretty evenly split (it's 11-11 at this point in time) on whether to keep them or delete them. Since there's no consensus to delete, they stay. Noel (talk) 02:06, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Delete

  1. Delete most CamelCase redirects. There is absolutely no reason to keep these after several years have elapsed since getting rid of the CamelCase misfeature of early wikis. jni 08:08, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
    "Absolutely no reason" is false, see below and above. Pcb21| Pete 22:15, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
  2. Delete all CamelCase redirects except genuine alternative capitalisations. There has been long enough. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 17:01, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
  3. Delete. They're ugly. Maurreen (talk) 17:04, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
  4. Delete except where inbound links can be found. Even though I have a CamelCase username, I recognize that it is an anachronism. The salient question is whether or not there are inbound links from other web sites that use these names. If there are, they should be preserved. I would suggest that should a google search for links to www.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinlandD (for example) come up empty (as FinlanD indeed does), there is no reason to keep the link. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 17:56, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
    • Do note that not all web pages are indexed by Google, etc; and of course links on people's computers (e.g. bookmarks, web links) won't show up either. So we can never be certain that there are no links to them out in the world. Of course, saying "delete if Google finds no links" is a perfectly valid position anyway. Noel (talk) 18:25, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
  5. Delete, not useful and causes confusion. - ulayiti (talk) 16:22, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
  6. Remove the policy to keep them, thus allowing us to examine them on an individual basis. I suspect that most of them are deletable unless there is some actual evidence of them being used externally. Radiant_>|< 16:40, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
    See above. You can never be sure where the links exist, so this proposed policy of "delete unless we can find links" is not workable. Pcb21| Pete 22:15, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
  7. I agree with jni. Most people will either update their links or else lose interest in the subject after a few weeks. Either way, there is no reason to clog up wikipedia. I vote to make it official policy to only keep CamelCase redirects for a certain length of time (say 3-6 months) unless it can be proved they are needed.the1physicist 03:04, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
    What does "clogging up" mean in this sense? Pcb21| Pete 22:15, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
  8. Since I was the one to bring the subject up (this time, regarding the very stupid-looking FinlanD) my vote is naturally delete. --Janke | Talk 20:29, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
  9. Delete. Note AmericA, which looks just as stupid as FinlanD. grendel|khan 16:15, August 9, 2005 (UTC)
    Looking "stupid" is hardly a reason for deletion. To many wiki users, they are the most natural thing in the world. Pcb21| Pete 22:15, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
  10. Delete, not useful and causes confusion. Martin Ulfvik 10:02, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
    They are useful, see above. What sort of confusion do they cause? Pcb21| Pete 22:15, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
  11. Delete. Phase-out period of this old behaviour has clearly ended by now. --Pjacobi 12:44, August 19, 2005 (UTC)

Keep

  1. Keep all CamelCase redirects. - SimonP 15:42, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
    • Would SimonP care to elaborate on why? He might convince us newbies. Septentrionalis 16:47, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
      • Mainly because potential benefit of deleting these is so low, that even the small chance of harm tips the scale. The articles existed at these names for some time, and could have been bookmarked, linked to externally, or referenced in offline publications. It is a general rule of web design to never break links without very good reason. - SimonP 17:19, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
  2. Keep as part of the history of Wikipedia. They don't cause any harm or take up any significant resource, and may still be linked from external sites. We should continue to follow the principal that links will continue to work as long as Wikipedia is around unless there is a good reason to do otherwise - i.e. they are needed for something else or cause something more important to break. If they are still around I think it is a fairly safe bet that neither of these cases apply, certainly at the moment. In future this may change, e.g. there may be a band (that is worthy of an article) known as FinlanD, at that time the CamelCase redirect can be dispensed with (but it would probably in this situation still contain a link to the Finland article). Thryduulf 17:14, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
  3. Keep. There may still be external links using the CamelCase form, and I'm sure that very old revisions of some of the articles do. --Carnildo 18:45, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
    • Oooh, interesting point: old versions retrieved from the history will no longer link properly. Hmm, that point has wider applicability than just to CamelCase redirs, I'll have to keep that in mind for other redirs. Noel (talk) 21:05, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
  4. Keep, because they do no harm, and as per Thryduulf. Though this should have been a discussion rather than a poll. OpenToppedBus - My Talk 12:23, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
  5. Not breaking links unnecessarily is a very important principle on the web. Seems natural to err on the side of caution. Pcb21| Pete 22:10, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
  6. Redirects and cheap and do no harm. Gdr 09:30:00, 2005-08-12 (UTC)
  7. Keep. Just in case external links still point to them. Redirs are cheap (even tho'I would prefer to delete some that others would prefer to keep (EG united states) since they would still be found, regardless of how someone types them--IMHO such redirs only add the distracting 'redired from ___' message to the article). Niteowlneils 02:04, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
  8. Keep, cheap and someone might be linking to them externally. JYolkowski // talk 02:06, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
  9. Keeep, do no harm. Proto t c 12:10, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
  10. Keep and add {{R CamelCase}} to redirect pages. See Category:Redirects from CamelCase —Pengo 03:30, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
  11. Keep The only good deleting them would do would be reducing confusion. There can be no significant confusion by someone ending up at the correct article. These are redirects, after all. Deleting them can do no good, while it has the potential to cause harm. [[smoddy]] 12:21, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
  12. Keep and flag them with {{R from CamelCase}} -- User:Docu

Comment/Neutral

  • I don't have a strong feeling one way or the other about keeping them; were it not for the fact that they often contain interesting history from the very earliest days of Wikipedia, I personally would favour getting rid of them. If we do decide to delete them, any that have article history would have to be archived, of course. Noel (talk) 16:36, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
  • Neutral. I have no objection to keeping them in general; but a blanket Keep policy seems silly. Septentrionalis 16:26, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Stub templates

Stub templates redirects to Wikipedia namespace, but it saves people from typing a lot of text. Delete or keep? — Stevey7788 (talk) 21:19, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

WP:STUBS works even better. No need to keep the one you found. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (TALK) 06:10, Dec. 21, 2005

CamelcasE

By the above poll, it seems obvious there is no consensus for automatically keeping any CamelcAse redirects simply because they're historical. This doesn't mean that they should all be deleted, but at least they should be judged on their own merits. Radiant_>|< 10:07, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

That's very disingenuous. We have a straw poll. One person suggests that route (you) and then you start a new section proposing that your idea becomes the policy. As far as I can tell the above only shows why voting is evil. In the case of split opinion it is much better to err on the side of caution and keep the redirects (no has yet shown a reason why the redirects are actually harmful, those in favour of deletion seem to be saying so out of some misguided notion of tidiness) . Pcb21| Pete 22:20, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
I didn't start the straw poll. I merely note that there exists a strong majority against the blanket policy of keeping all camelcase redirects. That doesn't imply that they should all be deleted, far from it, nor that anyone should go look for them to nominate them. It implies that, when one is nominated, people should consider if it is in fact useful, rather than simply reiterating a five-year-old blanket policy and ignoring further discussion. Radiant_>|< 08:35, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
I never said you did start the poll.
"Strong majority" - We should concentrate on strength of arguments and only resort to polls to break a deadlock. We haven't got that far yet. I am suggesting that the delete arguments are poor and am waiting for comeback on that. I really don't like your idea of taking things on a case-by-case basis. It just creates a whole stack more busywork. Pcb21| Pete 08:56, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Well yes. I don't either like the idea of taking things on a case-by-case basis (have just reverted myself on the RFD/reasons page). And it shouldn't have been started as a poll, although it'll probably boil down to that. Aesthetic reasons are important to many, and people who think "FinlanD" looks unprofessional have a point. It's not true as you say that "to many wiki users, they're natural" - only oldbies find them natural, newbies find them confusing. Radiant_>|< 09:13, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
No, Radiant, this poll confirms there is no consensus in favour of mass-deleting them. Not that there's no consensus for keeping them. Proto t c 12:11, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
  • I never said that. I said there's consensus for removing the guideline that camelcase redirects cannot be deleted (but have since changed my mind). Radiant_>|< 13:12, August 24, 2005 (UTC)

I started the poll (sorry for not signing to make it clear that I did it, I have fixed that) in the common meaning "a mechanism to gauge community feeling" - i.e. to see whether people agreed with the policy, or not. It is not a vote. In retrospect, it could have been slightly better organized (with a "case-by-case decision" section), but since this was really just an attempt to figure out if there was fairly good community consensus behind any particular approach, it's good enough; one can read the comments and get a sense of what the community wants. Noel (talk) 15:07, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

My fault?

I was the newbie who thought, when looking for my home country, and seeing FinlanD first in the list of suggested pages: "This looks so stupid - can't anything be done about a typo like that?" Only after finding out what CamelCase really was, did I understand. So, a question: Is there any way to automatically remove CamelCase from the search results, not the actual articles or redirects? For instance, should redirects be included in search result at all? (Still relatively newbie, I suspect that may be a dumb question, so please don't snarl... ;-) --Janke | Talk 14:27, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

Not without someone doing some coding changes - and this is likely to be low on the priority list of our over-worked developers. An additional problem in your proposal is that there are some articles/redirects with camelcase (such as CamelCase itself), and we'd have to develop some way of marking them so that search doesn't ignore them, and then go around and mark all such pages. So the answer to your question, in practical terms, alas, is probably "no". Noel (talk) 15:07, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
I see. But, IMHO, CamelCase looks "stupid" only when the last letter is capitalized. That might be much easier to code against, right? --Janke | Talk 06:49, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
Well, I suspect that the amount of code is not the issue; it's just a low-priority thing to do anything about it. But feel free to go ahead and post a request at MediaZilla, maybe they'll take pity on you! Noel (talk) 02:11, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Templatized

{{WP:RFD}}

template:WP:RFD – Template talk:WP:RFD

Not that I mind, but...

Why is this page backwards? Just about every other process page lists new entries on top. Radiant_>|< 13:11, August 24, 2005 (UTC)

Well, in the Old Days, a lot of them ran the 'other' direction, with new entries on the bottom. I mean, don't you usually add new entries to the bottom of, say, your grocery list? :-) This one just never converted. I am just very used to doing it in this direction (which I happen to like better than 'inverted'), so I've never changed it from the way it used to be. (If nothing else, the stuff at the top of the page is a constant reminder to me to get off the stick and clear up some of the backlog! :-) Noel (talk) 02:22, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
Another good reason to add new items at the bottom is that doing so doesn't cause problems with section editing. Sections are just numbered, so on an active page what was section #3 on the page when you clicked the [Edit] link on the section might actualy be section #4 or #5 in the database (depending on how active the page is, or how long you took reading it). That way you end up editing the wrong section, sometiles people don't even notice they are doing it, and it can cause some confution. It's not a common problem, but I've seen it happen on WP:CFD and WP:AFD a couple of times. --Sherool 22:04, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Non-English redirectors

Exactly why do we delete non-English redirectors, as they seem to be a perfectly valid navigation aid. IT also allows people to find things if they don't know the proper English term for something they know in the subject's primary language, or in their own mother-tongue. 132.205.45.110 19:07, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Because the reasonable way to do that is not by creating a redirect in the English wikipedia with the foreign language name, but to place a crosswiki link to the English article in the appropriate foreign language wiki, in either an existing article or a new stub article. Caerwine 00:33, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
It can't hurt to have the foreign language redirector. And if people on the non-english language wikipedias use the same delete criteria as in English, then that interlang link will not last long if it's just a redirect to a foreign language. So, once that happens, the link is lost. It also assumes that people will select that language first, or know what language it's in. (If for instance, you are an English person and you copy and paste a word to look it up). All this policy seems to do is to make navigation harder. 132.205.94.175 21:09, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
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