Wikipedia:Redirect/Deletion reasons
The major reasons why deletion of redirects is harmful are:
- a redirect may contain non-trivial edit history;
- if a redirect is reasonably old (or is the result of moving a page that has been there for quite some time), then it is possible that its deletion will break incoming links (such links coming from older revisions of Wikipedia pages, from edit summaries, from other Wikimedia projects or from elsewhere on the internet, do not show up in "What links here").
Therefore consider the deletion only of either harmful redirects or of recent ones.
Reasons for deleting
You might want to delete a redirect if one or more of the following conditions is met (but note also the exceptions listed below this list):
- The redirect page makes it unreasonably difficult for users to locate similarly named articles via the search engine. For example, if the user searches for "New Articles", and is redirected to a disambiguation page for "Articles", it would take much longer to get to the newly added articles on Wikipedia.
- The redirect might cause confusion. For example, if "Adam B. Smith" was redirected to "Andrew B. Smith", because Andrew was accidentally called Adam in one source, this could cause confusion with the article on Adam Smith, so the redirect should be deleted.
- The redirect is offensive or abusive, such as redirecting "Joe Bloggs is a Loser" to "Joe Bloggs" (unless "Joe Bloggs is a Loser" is legitimately discussed in the article), or "Joe Bloggs" to "Loser". (Speedy deletion criterion G10 and G3 may apply.) See also § Neutrality of redirects.
- The redirect constitutes self-promotion or spam. (Speedy deletion criterion G11 may apply.)
- The redirect makes no sense, such as redirecting "Apple" to "Orange". (Speedy deletion criterion G1 may apply.)
- It is a cross-namespace redirect out of article space, such as one pointing into the User or Wikipedia namespace. The major exception to this rule are the pseudo-namespace shortcut redirects, which technically are in the main article space. Some long-standing cross-namespace redirects are also kept because of their long-standing history and potential usefulness. "MOS:" redirects, for example, are an exception to this rule. (Note also the existence of namespace aliases such as WP:. Speedy deletion criterion R2 may apply if the target namespace is something other than Category:, Template:, Wikipedia:, Help:, or Portal:.)
- If the redirect is broken, meaning it redirects to an article that does not exist, it can be immediately deleted under speedy deletion criterion G8. You should check that there is not an alternative place it could be appropriately redirected to first and that it has not become broken through vandalism.
- If the redirect is a novel or very obscure synonym for an article name that is not mentioned in the target, it is unlikely to be useful. In particular, redirects in a language other than English to a page whose subject is unrelated to that language (or a culture that speaks that language) should generally not be created. (Implausible typos or misnomers are candidates for speedy deletion criterion R3, if recently created.)
- If the target article needs to be moved to the redirect title, but the redirect has been edited before and has a history of its own, then the title needs to be freed up to make way for the move. If the move is uncontroversial, tag the redirect for G6 speedy deletion, or alternatively (with the
suppressredirect
user right; available to page movers and admins), perform a round-robin move. If not, take the article to Requested moves.