,
so even if they are misspelled or whatever, they are mostly
left to rot unless they break something (for example when
someone wants to use a redlink like [[redlink]] and someone
else makes a redirect for "redlink"). I don't think there is
any Wikimedia project that actively deletes redirects.
In
general, redirects are supposed to be used as alternate
names for the same thing, and in Wikidata, this is done by
typing in alternate labels. Of course people also use
redirects as a way of "bundling concepts" - just take a look
at all the redirects to the article for "insurance" for all
the types of insurance that don't yet have their own
article.
Before
Wikidata there were lots of interwiki links to redirects,
and this caused multiple issues with unresolvable
interwikilinks. Wikidata was invented to be able to use
persistent identifiers for Wikipedia articles. Now everyone
is surprised that now the interwikilinks work differently
from before. The fact that redirects are not supported is by
design and not a bug. Going forward, instead of making
redirects, Wikidatans should just keep creating items in
Wikidata and let the Wikipedias take care of themselves by
letting them create articles and redirects in the normal
wiki way. It should not be a goal for Wikidata to sitelink
to every redirect in every Wikipedia, just as it is not a
goal to sitelink to every image on Wikimedia Commons.
The
subject at hand in this email thread is that instead of
creating an article, the user ThurnerRupert made a redirect
in the German
Wikipedia called "afrikanische Pflaume" that links to "Prunus"
and expected to be able to interwikilink this redirect via
the Wikidata item for "African Plum" to the French
Wikipedia's article for "safou". I would say that Wikidata
should not support this workflow and it is incorrect editing
behavior. This has nothing to do with the numbers of
redirects or whether or not they need to be deleted by
anybody.
Jane