[WikiEN-l] Redirects

Sun Dec 21 00:59:10 UTC 2003

Hi.

Is there an established policy on the English Wikipedia as to what sort 
of Redirects should or should not exist?

I used to maintain the point of view that having redirects all over the 
place (as long as they always go to the intended article) can never do 
any harm, and in fact they keep the pages accessible under old links 
(i.e. deleting them would break links elsewhere on the Internet).

However, I remember having an argument about this on the German 
Wikipedia mailinglist a few months back, and it seemed that their 
prevailing view was that redirects should only exist in places where a 
paper encyclopedia would have an item saying "see: XYZ", lest they 
clutter up the "All articles" Special page.

What is the view of the English Wikipedia in this regard? Currently 
there seem to be a lot of redirects that seem redundant, but as I said, 
my view on this is that they do not do any harm.

As an example, should the following page be deleted or kept?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Sozialdemokratischen_Partei_Deutschlands&redirect=no

because the actual German name of the party is "Sozialdemokratische 
Partei Deutschlands", not "Sozialdemokratischen" - that is an inflected 
form (genitive or dative).

Or how about wrong spellings, should these be kept? e.g.
http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Condoleeza_Rice&redirect=no
http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Condolezza_Rice&redirect=no

And what about ancient subpages, e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Star_Trek/BElanna_Torres&redirect=no

Thanks,
Timwi