Wikipedia talk:Soft redirect

message: I thought they were speedy-deletable. Kappa 15:30, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If you delete them, someone else will likely re-create the page - and add content, to boot. A soft redirect, while somwhat ugly, is preferable to that. Noel (talk) 14:03, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Are soft redirects allowed? 

message: Interwiki redirects have been disabled in MediaWiki (see e.g. m:Help:Redirect#Interwiki redirects and redirects to special pages), so that the page is obsolete. It should be probably deleted or completely rewritten. --Mormegil 08:28, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The page has been updated to reflect the fact that (hard) interwiki redirects have been turned off. However the page is not obsolete! We still want to create soft redirects for borderline cases where the decision has been to include the content in a Wikimedia wiki other than Wikipedia. Pcb21| Pete 16:12, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The page is obsolete 

message: Anakin Skywalker is a soft redirect to Darth Vader to avoid spoilers. Is this a valid use of a soft redirect? Perhaps that should be mentioned. Coffee 06:24, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Heh, not much activity here. This should have been discussed at WP:SPOILER. I've removed the now disputed section (disputed by myself) pending the outcome of the discussion on Wikipedia talk:Spoiler warning#Spoiler redirects that reveal true identities. -- Ned Scott 07:01, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spoilers 

message: Suppose there is a page with a long title, Aaaaaaa Bbbbbbbbbb Ccccccccccc Dddddddddd, and ABCD as an abbreviation redirects to it. Now if someone wants to link to the talk page of the main article, they should be able to link to Talk:ABCD. This will link to the talk page of the redirect page, which they probably did not want. Putting a hard redirect in Talk:ABCD is probably overkill, as someone may want to talk about the redirect page itself. It seems reasonable to put a soft redirect on the Talk:ABCD page, to the Talk:Aaaaaaa Bbbbbbbbbb Ccccccccccc Dddddddddd. What is the policy on this? --Kprateek88(Talk | Contribs) 06:33, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Depending on how the redirect was made, many will redirect to the proper talk page. If one name redirects to another, then it's ok to do the same with the talk page. If there is old content on the talk page then it probably should be archived on the talk page the redirect points to. -- Ned Scott 07:28, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. --Kprateek88(Talk | Contribs) 07:32, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can talk pages of normal redirect pages be soft-redirected? 

message: Should the template be the only thing on a soft redirect page, or can there be one or two sentences explaining the item in addition?  --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 03:44, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Why is that necessary? nadav (talk) 08:11, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  how much content on a soft redirect? 

message: If a page is transwikied and deleted, should it usually be replaced with a soft redirect? Some say that all redirects out of the wikipedia mainspace are to be avoided. See this RfD for a particular case, though I am more interested in the general question of redirects to sister projects. nadav (talk) 08:09, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redirects to sister projects 

message: See Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Soft redirects to Wikia wikis and other non-Wikimedia GFDL projects. --Stormie 00:08, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Here is an updated link to the archived discusison: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 3#Soft redirects to Wikia wikis and other non-Wikimedia GFDL projects --Explodicle (T/C) 14:07, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question re: soft redirects to other GFDL wikis 

message: Is this soft redirect from slack space to internal fragmentation a good use of a soft redirect? I am pretty sure it is not, but what else can I use? Using a hard redirect will probably confuse, but the term itself does not need its own article. Qevlarr (talk) 12:41, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question: Redirect usage for clarification 

message: Wikipedia is full of duplicated data, often contradictory (e.g. see the History section of United States, compare with History of the United States). Frankly, the whole thing is becoming a mess. The solution is an increased use of soft redirects to channel editors towards a "core" article. Where is the WP policy against duplication?  Emmanuelm (talk) 14:03, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Soft redirects to reduce data duplication in WP -- Where's the policy?

message: I have started a discussion on soft redirects, and their future on the project, here.  Any input from people knowledable about redirects in general is welcome and encouraged. - TexasAndroid (talk) 19:50, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Has been archived to Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive_34#Soft redirects without much response. --Kubanczyk (talk) 13:13, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Soft redirect discussion 

message: The whole section "Wikipedia:Soft redirect#Soft redirects from Wikipedia to Wiktionary" does not belong here. If unexperienced Wikipedians look for a guideline what to do with a dictdef article, they do not  expect that the answer can be found under "soft redirect" title. The "soft redirect" is in fact the answer!
I think this section should be moved to WP:AfD WP:SISTER. --Kubanczyk (talk) 13:22, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. --Kubanczyk (talk) 08:43, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  The transwiki section does not belong here! 

message: Background that led up to this:
*User talk:TexasAndroid/Archive7#Article for deletion - an early breif discussion in the saga of soft redirects. 
*Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Omglolwtfbbq - an AFD discussion on a soft redirect
*Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 34#Soft redirects - Village pump discussion attempt that suffered from a lack of interest.
*Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Archive 28#Proposed change to A3 - My abbortive attempt to get a CSD A3 wording change.  Abborted for lack of interest.
*User talk:TexasAndroid/Archive7#FOAD - someone who intensely dislikes soft redirects, and thinks all should be subject to A3 deletion.
*User talk:UsaSatsui#Deletion of soft redirects - Discussion today that kicked this off.
Basically, the issue at hand is whether, for project administration purposes, soft redirects should be treated as articles or as redirects.  This mostly applies to deletion of these things, but may also have other applications.  Articles and redirects have separate deletion systems, separate speedy deletion criteria, etc.  In the links above, it's become evident that soft redirects are considered by many on the project to be more related to articles than to redirects.  And given their mechanics, this is a little true.  But functionally soft redirects mimic the purposes and effects of true redirects.
It's my opinion that soft redirects should be handled explicitly by the methods and systems in place for redirects, not by those in place for articles.  Thus, they would be subject to WP:RFD, and not subject to WP:AFD or WP:PROD.  They could be speedy deleted under R# criteria, especially R1, and could *not* be deleted under A# criteria, especially not A3.
For some people, this will be how it should have been all along.  For others, it'll be a change.  This discrepancy highlights the fact that we are currently a bit ambiguous as to which systems should cover these.
My plan is that, baring any major objection here on this talk page, I'll add text to the accompanying page in a week or so clarifying that these shoud be goverened by Redirect guidelines, not Article guidelines.  Given the lack of any interest in the subject that I have encountered in the past, I plan to add the text even if I get little or no response, though any opposition will need to be discussed and taken into consideration. - TexasAndroid (talk) 15:38, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I think this is a non-controversial change, so please consider introducing it right now. These points have been already made in the Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion policy and survived three days - seems like a sign of silent consensus. --Kubanczyk (talk) 19:05, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Added - TexasAndroid (talk) 14:15, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deletion of soft redirects 

message: Should soft redirects be added to disambiguation pages?  I am developing Navibot, which adds entries to DABs, and it wanted to add jelly roll (slang) to the DAB page jelly roll.  The bot can easily filter these out by the presence of the template, but I'm not sure whether it should—in general I try to have it do what human editors do.  Thanks for any insights.  —johndburger 18:40, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Soft redirects on DAB pages? 

message: Although soft redirects to Wikipedias in other languages are possible, they seem quite undesirable due to the unlikelihood that English speakers will be able to benefit from them. This recently came up at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2008 November 22#Pia Malakul → th:เจ้าพระยาพระเสด็จสุเรนทราธิบดี. I suggest that this page include advice not to create such a soft redirect unless there is a really good reason to do so. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 09:23, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redirects to foreign language Wikipedias 

message: This page says that the soft redirect tells the reader to go elsewhere. It doesn't, though. It prints an arrow pointing to an external link. The only thing it explicitly says is "Hi, I'm a soft redirect!" Soft redirects should be much more clear, containing reader/newb-friendly text like "This page is hosted on another Wikimedia project, found here" or something like it. Honestly, though, I'm not at all sure I see the point to forcing even that much down the user's throat, when it should be perfectly acceptable to do an actual honest-to-God-redirect when another Wikimedia Foundation page is the target. MrZaiustalk 07:20, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm a little bit worried that it could confuse the reader if they don't notice they've been sent to another wiki. --Explodicle (T/C) 18:34, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Still, it could be made more userfriendly with additional prose and, if we want to go that direction, a nice little "You will be automatically redirected in 5,4,3,2,1" type thing in Javascript. Ie, there's no reason you couldn't warn them before moving them offsite. Small caveat: As this tool would have pretty obvious ramifications vis a vis vandals, you might want to limit the utility of this presumably fully-protected-out-of-the-box redirect tool to sister Wikimedia projects. MrZaiustalk 03:09, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "That tells" - It does? 

message: I  to Kemonomimi some time ago and asked on the template's talk page to get better support for transwiki so that the soft link can be more  asetically pleasing. However, I've not gotten a response in some time.陣内Jinnai 01:48, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Better support for transwiki 

message: Wikipedia:LiquidThreads currently soft redirects to m:LiquidThreads which soft redirects again to http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads. 
Is it possible to soft redirect directly to the mediawiki site? I notice there's no magic word for it like there is for Meta (m:). -- œ™ 21:48, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I just fixed it. For future reference here's the list of InterWikimedia links. --Explodicle (T/C) 15:12, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh so there was one after all, I wasn't aware of that page. Thank you. -- œ™ 19:40, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Soft redirect to www.mediawiki.org 

message: Should soft redirects be stub-tagged? My instinct is that they should not, but I see, for instance, Carlos Mendoza Davis, which is currently tagged with "stub". Should it, or pages like it, be stub-sorted, or should the stub tag be removed?--Opus 113 (talk) 02:47, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: No, they should not. And it was incorrect to soft-redirect an article to another language Wikipedia. The proper thing to do would be a translation, which I've gone ahead and done. -- œ™ 08:13, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  stub categorization of soft redirects 

message: I sent to Krenair you a message on Italian Wiktionary. Please read mit. My nickname in Italian wikriuonary is Ulisse  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.58.116.123 (talk) 16:15, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Message in italian wikrionary

message: Can there, I wonder? Are there any examples?--Worst regards, Greek Fellows". Visit ma talk page and ma contributions. 04:22, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can there be multiple redirects on a soft redirect page? 

message: User:AnomieBOT III will currently convert attempted interwiki redirects into soft redirects. It has been proposed that the bot also apply  to such redirects in article space, as WP:Soft redirect discourages these. Please comment at WP:VPR#Proposal to automatically ProD redirects to other language versions of wikipedia, instead of turhing them into soft redirects. Thanks. Anomie⚔ 13:13, 22 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal needing input 

message: I have asked a question regarding the use of Template:Soft redirect that watchers of this page may be able to assist. The discussion can be found at Template talk:Soft redirect#Question regarding when this template was created. Steel1943 (talk) 21:45, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question/discussion at [[Template talk:Soft redirect]] 

message: .. this passage:
"(Reasons: they could not be easily edited without hand-crafting the correct URL, since clicking on a link to the redirect page would take you straight to the redirect's target and there would be no "Redirected from foo" message to click, so it would be difficult to return to the redirect page itself; there would also be infinite-loop security considerations.)"
I do not understand the "easily edited without hand-crafting ..." argument.
Also, to return to the original page, shouldn't one usually be able to use the browser's "back-button" functionality? 
And what actually is an "infinite-loop security consideratin"?
And what does this mean?
"
A soft redirect can be useful if one wants to link to it from its target, as an invitation to create a page, like a red link. 
Just as a red link looks different from an ordinary link, a link to a soft redirect can look different using the [[<tvar|link>Help:Link#Stub feature</>|stub link feature]] (this can be activated by setting a "Threshold for stub link formatting" under "Advanced options" on the "Appearance" tab of the user preferences)."
Would it acutally make sense to link to a soft redirect from its target? Why and how would that work?
And do have enough people activated the "stub link feature" for it to make sense mentioning it here at all?
I quote again:
"
Another situation where soft redirects are used is when the intended target is a special page, and the system automatically "softens" attempted hard redirects to special pages. For example, :en:Wikipedia:List of tags redirects to :en:Special:Tags."
Why does the system "soften attempted hard redirects to special pages" ?
thanks for elaborating, 
--KaiKemmann (talk) 22:44, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Could someone please explain, .. 

message: Template:Wikispecies redirect has been nominated for deletion. Interested editors may participate at the template's entry at templates for discussion. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 05:35, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nomination for deletion of Template:Wikispecies redirect 

message: I was surprised to find Googling (or Binging) "Category Lodhi dynasty" returning, as the first Wikipedia result, the soft-redirected :Category:Lodhi dynasty. Googling category "should be empty" finds 45,000 redirected categories (or 1,280,000 on Bing, doh!) Hard redirects don't get indexed, for example searching for Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging  gets Gauteng as first WP result.
Is such indexing desirable? I would have thought avoiding it was better.
I suspect it's all about the <link rel="canonical" href="..."/> at the top of the generated html. Google's advice is here. (I do understand that the WikiMedia internals for soft and hard redirects are quite different.) Batternut (talk) 00:08, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  45,000 soft redirects indexed by Google 

message: There once was :Category:Articles needing translation from Frisian Wikipedia. It was deleted because there are three Wikipedias that applies to: West Frisian, North Frisian, and Saterland Frisian. There are categories for all three:
*:Category:Articles needing translation from Western Frisian Wikipedia
*:Category:Articles needing translation from North Frisian Wikipedia
*:Category:Articles needing translation from Saterland Frisian Wikipedia
This needs a soft redirect from that page, to all three. We have double soft redirects, and we have category redirects, but we don't have triple soft category redirects.
Could someone with more experience at Wikipedia editing than me make Template:Triple soft category redirect, please?
I’ve added links to the other categories on the page, but this is a bad, temporary solution.
thanks,
DemonDays64 | Tell me if I'm doing something wrong :P 21:21, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Triple soft category redirect 

message: The current guideline requires that , on the basis that . That seems both:
* unrealistic as 3/4 of English speakers are non-native, and thus at least that also read other languages; and 
* outdated at this day and age of ubiquitous automated webpage translation tools (that rule was introduced over 13 years ago!).
This guideline was brought to my attention in a recent RfD, where it was argued that allowing soft redirects to non-enwikis would produce "a billion redirects to subjects that wouldn't qualify under enwiki's inclusion criteria." Not only soft redirects, wherever they redirect to, remain subject to enwiki's inclusion criteria, but also a non-enwiki soft redirect would only be created for subjects without an article on enwiki, but covered in a non-enwiki (e.g. German Wine Fund).— Guarapiranga ☎ 02:10, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: The guideline is reasonable. I would not like to click a bluelink only to find out I have to go to another language wiki to read about it. It is an annoying tease. H:FOREIGNLINK serves the purpose of informing the reader that while we dont have an enwiki article yet, a corresponding foreign article is available (with the language abbreviation mentioned). Soft redirects should be for titles that do not have a scope for an enwiki article. Jay (talk) 03:05, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Right! Withdrawn. I didn't know that page. I've proposed a clarification to that effect in the guideline. Please feel free to revert or correct it, if need be. — Guarapiranga ☎ 23:16, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Soft redirects to non-enwikis 

message: Which is preferred, using a wiktlink (e.g. wikt:pomosexual) or a soft redirect wikilink (e.g. pomosexual)? — Tazuco ✉️ 15:43, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: In most cases, I think articles should use standard wikilinks over Wiktionary links. That way, if the page with the soft redirect becomes something else (an article, a regular redirect, etc.), no further action needs to be taken. - Eureka Lott 00:37, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikt redirects