Help:Redirect

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For general info on redirects in MediaWiki, see Wikipedia's Help on Redirects — part of the MediaWiki User's Guide. This article discusses policy on the use and abuse of redirects on the Spiral Knights Wiki, and is taken largely from Wikipedia's policy. Other MediaWiki projects may have different approaches.

How to make a redirect

To redirect a page (1) to a different page (2), enter on the top of page 1:

#REDIRECT [[NAME OF PAGE 2]]

If you are redirecting to a section on a page, this would be:

#REDIRECT [[NAME OF PAGE 2#SECTION OF PAGE]]

For example, to redirect the Administrators page to the SpiralKnights:Administrators page, edit the Administrators page and enter:

#REDIRECT [[SpiralKnights:Administrators]]

More examples are included below:

What do we use redirects for?

Reason Usage notes, and text that will be shown Tag Category to find articles so tagged
Abbreviations  

This is a redirect from a title with an abbreviation.

For more information, follow the category link.

{{R from abbreviation}} (Usage) Category:Redirects from abbreviation
Misspellings  

This is a redirect from a misspelling or typographical error.

Pages using this link should be updated to link directly to the page this link redirects to.

For more information, follow the category link.

{{R from misspelling}} (Usage) Category:Redirects from misspellings
Other spellings, other punctuation  

This is a redirect from a title with a different spelling.

Pages using this link should be updated to link directly to the page this link redirects to.

For more information, follow the category link.

  • colour would redirect to color
{{R from alternate spelling}} (Usage) Category:Redirects from alternate spellings
Other capitalizations, for use in links  

This is a redirect from a title with another method of capitalization. It leads to the title in accordance with the Spiral Knights Wiki naming conventions for capitalization, and can help writing.

  • Fleet Officer would redirect to Fleet officer
{{R for alternate capitalization}} (Usage) Category:Redirects for alternative capitalization
Other capitalizations, to ensure that "Go" to a mixed-capitalization article title is case-insensitive  

This is a redirect from a title with another method of capitalization. It leads to the title in accordance with the Spiral Knights Wiki naming conventions for capitalization, and can help writing.


Adding a redirect for mixed-capitalization article titles (e.g., Isle of Kent) allows "Go" to these articles to be case-insensitive. For example, without the redirect Terms of service a "Go" for "Terms Of service" or any capitalization other than exactly 'Terms of Service' would not find the article Terms of Service.

Why: Articles whose titles contain mixed-capitalization words (not all initial caps, or not all lower case except the first word) are found via "Go" only by an exact case match. (Articles, including redirects, whose titles are either all initial caps or only first word capitalized are found via "Go" using a case-insensitive match.)

Note: "Go" related redirects are needed only if the article title has more than two words and words following the first have different capitalizations. They are not needed, for example, for proper names which are all initial caps.

Examples:

  • Redirect Qbeez Whirled to QBeez Whirled is needed because the Go search is case-sensitive for mixed-caps titles. Adding this redirect allows the article to be found when a user enters "vice chancellor of austria" or "vice chancellor of Austria" as a Go search.
  • No redirect to Underwhirled Drift is needed because the "Go" command is case-insensitive for an article whose title is all initial caps. Any capitalisation (e.g. "underWhIRLed dRIFT") entered as a "Go" will find the article.
{{R for alternate capitalization}} (Usage) Category:Redirects for alternative capitalization
Other names, pseudonyms, nicknames, and synonyms  

This is a redirect from a title that is an alternative name, a pseudonym, a nickname or a synonym.

It leads to the title in accordance with the naming conventions for common names and can help writing.

For more information, follow the category link.

{{R from alternate name}} (Usage) Category:Redirects from alternate names
Plurals, tenses, etc  

This is a redirect from a plural word to the singular equivalent.

For more information follow the category link.

  • agents redirects to agent, etc.
    • Note that [[agent]]s shows up as agents, so it is not usually necessary to redirect plurals
{{R from plural}} (Usage) Category:Redirects from plurals
Related words  

This is a redirect from a related word.

Redirects from related words are not properly redirects from alternate spellings of the same word. But at the same time, they are also different from redirects from a subtopic, since the related word is unlikely to warrant a full subtopic in the target page.

For more information follow the category link.

{{R from related word}} (Usage) Category:Redirects from related words
Sub-topics or closely related topics that should be explained within the text  

This is a redirect from a title for a topic more detailed than the topic of the page this redirects to. Eventually if the target page becomes too big, this redirect may be replaced with an article carved out of the target page.

For more information follow the category link.

{{R with possibilities}} (Usage) Category:Redirects with possibilities
Facilitate disambiguation  

This is a redirect to a disambiguation page. This redirect is pointed to by links that should always point to the disambiguation page rather than be disambiguated.

For more information follow the category link.

{{R to disambiguation page}} (Usage) Category:Redirects to disambiguation pages
To redirect from a shortcut  

This is a redirect from a shortcut. Shortcuts are reserved for Spiral Knights Wiki project reference pages (SpiralKnights: namespace) only.

For more information follow the category link.

{{R from shortcut}} (Usage) Category:Redirects from shortcut
  • Avoiding broken links (see below)
  • Minor but notable topics

Sub-topic redirects are often temporary, eventually being replaced by fully fledged articles on the sub-topic in question. Be conservative when creating sub-topic redirects — they can sometimes be counter-productive, because they disguise the absence of a proper article from editors. Sub-topic redirects should only be used where the main article has a section on the sub-topic. For example, on Wikipedia, denial of service has a section on distributed denial of service. Sub-topics should be boldfaced on their first appearance in the section, to indicate that they are in fact alternate titles or sub-titles.

In accordance with wikipedia:naming conventions (precision) it's best to have an article at a well-defined, unambiguous term, with redirects from looser colloquial terms, rather than vice versa.

See also: Redirect template message list

Renamings and merges

We try to avoid broken links, because they annoy visitors. Therefore, if we change the layout of some section of the Whirled Wiki, or we merge two duplicate articles, we always leave redirects in the old location to point to the new location. Search engines and visitors will probably have linked to that page at that url. If the page is deleted, potential new visitors from search engines will be greeted with an edit window. The same is true for anyone who previously bookmarked that page, and so on.

On a small scale, this applies to cases where we had duplicate articles on some subject, or lots of twisty little stubs on different aspects of the same overall subject.

When should we delete a redirect?

To propose the deletion of a redirect, write in the article's talk page, and add a proposed deletion template if you feel it's warranted. See the deletion policy for details on how to nominate pages for deletion. Please also see this page on Wikipedia for reasons not to delete a redirect.


This isn't necessary if you just want to replace a redirect with an article, or change where it points: see How do I change a redirect? on Wikipedia for instructions on how to do this. If you want to swap a redirect and an article, but are not able to move the article to the location of the redirect please ask on the article's talk page to request help from an admin in doing that.

What needs to be done on pages that are targets of redirects?

We follow the "principle of least astonishment" — after following a redirect, the reader's first question is likely to be: "hang on ... I wanted to read about this. Why has the link taken me to that?". Make it clear to the reader that they have arrived in the right place.

Normally, we try to make sure that all "inbound redirects" are mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs of the article. For example:

Don't cause a secondary redirect. They don't work like a primary redirect; same with tertiary redirects.

Self-links, duplicate links

Avoid self-links, including self-links through redirects ("loop links"). Also, avoid having two links that go to the same place. These can confuse readers, and cause them to unnecessarily load the same page twice.

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