Wikipedia talk:Redirects for discussion/Archive 1

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

text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title: Mis-spelling policy

message: I disagree strongly with the notion that redirects that are uncommon mispellings should be deleted. Why?
#The database and web server can handle it. Easily.
#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).
#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.
#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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Let's not create more work for ourselves, please 

message: 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  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)
thread_title:  Redirects with quotes 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Access Counts? 

message: 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)
thread_title: WP:RM

message: 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)
thread_title: Duplication of text from [[Wikipedia:Redirect]]

message: The term biped forms - like most English words - the plural by adding "s". Someone (who presumably wasn't aware we can create links like "bipeds") 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)
thread_title: Name with plural "s" added

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Only delete if there is no significant history 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Stupid parentheses 

message: 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)
replies: text: Why not notify the nominators? It would be little trouble and might prevent more hassle. --MarSch 12:05, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: 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)
replies: text:  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)
thread_title: Articles for deletion?

message: 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)
thread_title:  CamelCase redirects 

message: # 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)
thread_title: Delete

message: # 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)
thread_title: Keep

message: * 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)
thread_title: Comment/Neutral

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text:  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)
replies: text:  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)
thread_title: My fault?

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Not that I mind, but...

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Non-English redirectors