UESPWiki:Archive/CP Redirects for Deletion

Redirects for Deletion
There has been a large amount of redirects put up for proposed deletion, mostly because they are the result of page moves and often considered to be "useless redirects". There is a fine line between useless redirect and usefull redirect for every wiki, with high-traffic sites like Wikipedia often leaning on the side of keep. Take a look at the guidelines for redirect deletion at , and tell me if you agree with them and feel free to propose any additional redirect criteria. --Aristeo | Talk 17:46, 27 September 2006 (EDT)
:These guidelines are fine by me, as long as storing too many redirects doesn't become an issue. --DrPhoton 03:16, 28 September 2006 (EDT)

One specific question with the policy on deleting redirects is whether to consider redirects from page reorganization as candidates for speedy deletion after some period of time; the current policy states that this period is one month.  There are alot of these pages out there ("Quests/", "Morrowind:Places:", "Morrowind:Factions:", etc), which I believe should be candidates for automatic deletion once enough time has passed.  However, there is concern that deleting these redirects will break external links, in particular on various forums.  So the interrelated questions that come up are:
How long is a reasonable amount of time to wait before deleting these pages?
How high of a priority should we place on guaranteeing that old external links to the site still work?
Why should pages that aren't causing any problems on our site be deleted if there is any risk of external problems?

I think a one month interval is probably sufficient.  If our primary concern is links from the forum, it's unlikely that any threads more than one month old are still going to be read (especially on high-volume forums like the official forums).  And I don't think that it reflects badly on UESP if somebody else's link to our site is out of date.  Finally, most of the pages that have been cleaned up so far were much more than one month old (most were three to six months old); in other words, the one month rule doesn't mean that every old redirect here is going to vanish as soon as one month has passed.

Although these old redirects are not fundamentally interfering with the site, many of them are not currently orphaned.  For me, the most convenient way to go through and fix all of the UESP links to these pages is to do it as I delete them.  Otherwise it becomes impossible to keep track of where I left off, and I end up wasting time rechecking alot of pages.

So does anyone have any concerns about continuing to delete alot of these old redirects under the existing policy? --Nephele 20:05, 29 September 2006 (EDT)

I don't know why we want to delete redirects. Redirects are cheap, and they don't hurt anything. If you're worried about them cluttering up the wiki, then we should rethink having the subpages "/Author" and "/Desc" under the books and having /Description under the quests, places, etc. Those clutter up , and  is cluttered to the point of in-usability. Redirects are only partially in the way with , and even then they don't get in the way in my opinion.

Addendum: Now that I've thought about it longer, we do need a way to prevent unused redirects from building up too high. Speedy deleting after one month seems a little soon. Perhaps we could propose deletion after two months, because everyone's opinion of a useful/useless deletion is different and so we could save a few more external links. (But this doesn't mean that don't loathe those subpages anymore!) --Aristeo | Talk 23:45, 29 September 2006 (EDT)

:My concern about going through a proposed deletion process for some of these pages is the needless waste of effort of going through and adding a deletion tag to each and every one of those pages; there are easily a hundred pages.  As we discussed on IRC, I think in cases where the page names have already been debated in some manner, proposed deletion isn't really needed.  For example, for the "Quests/" pages, there was a community discussion about the naming system being used for quests.  So I would support changing the policy to state that after two months redirects can be proposed for deletion unless the naming system used on that page has already been discussed; in that case a speedy deletion is allowed after two months.  --Nephele 04:22, 30 September 2006 (EDT)

::If the consensus is older than one week, then it's as good as a deletion review. In fact, it even says in the deletion policy that occasionally a proposal will be outside the jurisdiction of any one of the three deletion systems, and in those cases, the proposal should be held on the administrative noticeboard. --Aristeo | Talk 22:00, 3 October 2006 (EDT)

I created a category group starting at :Category:Redirects that could sort the redirects by their use. What do you think? --Aristeo | Talk 21:46, 3 October 2006 (EDT)

:This is a very good idea! It will help us classify the redirects between the ones that should be deleted and the ones that shouldn't, and make a good policy on how to proceed. --DrPhoton 03:32, 4 October 2006 (EDT)