User:Ricken/SandboxPG/Redirects

A redirect is a page that has no content itself but sends the reader to another page, usually an article or section of an article. For example, if you type "CK" in the search box or follow the wikilink CK, you will be taken to the article Celestial Kingdom with a note at the top of the page: "_{(Redirected from CK)}". This is because the page CK contains the wikitext #REDIRECT [[Celestial Kingdom]], which defines it as a redirect page and indicates the target article. It is also possible to redirect to a specific section of the target page, using #REDIRECT [[Page name#Section title]].

This page contains guidance on the proper use of redirects.

Purposes of redirects

• Alternative names redirect to the most appropriate article title (Clalibus redirects to Clalibus of Henceforth).
• Plurals (Kingdoms redirects to Kingdom).
• Closely related words (Beltline redirects to Knightly family).
• Adjectives/adverbs point to noun forms
• Less specific forms of names, for which the article subject is still the primary topic.
• More specific forms of names
• Abbreviations and initialisms, for which the article subject is the primary use of the abbreviation or initialism (DS redirects to Dragonspine Places)
• Alternative spellings or punctuation.
• Punctuation issues—titles containing dashes should have redirects using hyphens.
• Representations using ASCII characters, that is, common transliterations
• Likely misspellings
• Likely alternative capitalizations
• Sub-topics or other topics which are described or listed within a wider article. (Such redirects are often targeted to a particular section of the article.)
• Redirects to disambiguation pages that do not contain "(disambiguation)" in the title
• Old-style CamelCase links (if already in existence) (DragonspinePlaces redirects to Dragonspine Places)

Making redirects

To create a basic redirect manually, set #REDIRECT [[target page name here]] as the only body text of the page. For instance, if you were redirecting from "CK" to "Celestial Kingdom", this would be the entire body of the "CK" page:

#REDIRECT [[Celestial Kingdom]]

Redirects can also be automatically created when you move (rename) an existing page.

Targeted redirects

Most redirects are untargeted, and simply lead to the page and not a particular part of the page. It is also possible to create a targeted redirect, i.e. a redirect to a particular point on the target page—either a section header or an anchor. For example Cub (a term for [[Tiger Clan probationary members) redirects to Tiger Clan#Recruitment.

Consider that when the target page is displayed, it is likely that the top of the page will not be shown, so the user may not see the helpful "(redirected from... )" text unless they know to scroll back to the top. This is less likely to cause confusion if the redirect is to a heading with the same name as the redirect.

Double redirects

The software that runs AmtWiki doesn't support chains of redirects: These are called double redirects. A redirect should not be left pointing to another redirect.

These are often created when moving pages to a new title. After moving a page, check whether there are any redirects to the old title (using the link on the move result page, or using "What links here"), and change them to redirect straight to the new title. Double redirects are usually fixed by a bot after some time.

Deleting redirects

Redirects can be deleted using the normal procedures for page deletion. However, unless a redirect is deleted to be replaced by a full article, deleting a redirect could be harmful for the following reasons:

• if a redirect is reasonably old, or is the result of moving a reasonably old page, deleting the redirect could cause links on other pages to break.
• An external source may link directly to the URL of a page, and removing a redirect could make it hard for people to find their intended article.

Only consider deleting redirects that are recent or harmful.

Reasons for deleting

• The redirect page makes it unreasonably difficult for users to locate similarly named articles via the search engine. For example, if the user searches for "Old News", and is redirected to a disambiguation page for "News", it would take much longer to get to the records of old news in the Amtgard community.
• The redirect might cause confusion.
• The redirect is offensive or abusive, such as redirecting "Reggie is a Loser" to "Reggie" (unless "Reggie is a Loser" is discussed in the article), or "Reggie" to "Loser" (speedy deletion may apply).
• The redirect constitutes self-promotion or spam (speedy deletion may apply).
• The redirect makes no sense, such as redirecting Blackspire to Carrot (speedy deletion may apply).
• It is a cross-namespace redirect out of article space, such as one pointing into the User or AmtWiki namespace.
• If the redirect is broken, meaning it redirects to itself or to an article that does not exist, it can be immediately deleted under speedy deletion criteria, though you should check that there is not an alternative place it could be appropriately redirected to first.