why required well these questions go back to the old days it used to be thought that redirects were bad and we should avoid them trying as hard as we can to replace them with the precise name then it was discovered that google found things easier through redirects and they provided a way for us refine google's search semantics quite a bit so it helps people find what they want and avoids the problems of having to be too precise about linkages its more of a wiki way to do it not to mention that this type of linkage comes from our disambig policy to use disambig pages liberally but always be hierarchical according to common sense more recently it was discovered that tools to fix redirects like the one in wp pop are hugely taxing on the server so that ended the last of the purists crying about link precision the funny thing is that link precision is actually a hindance to semantic searching so over the years the idea has been to make wp redirects function as a part of the semantic web that's an explanation in a nutshell vertigo