Wikivoyage:How to redirect a page

Shortcut:
Wikivoyage:Redirect

Redirection pages are pages that automatically link to another page. You may want to have a redirection page for any of the following reasons.

There are different ways of writing the article title, but only one article,
The article is in a different namespace (nowadays discouraged).
Two articles have been merged into one,
The page might become a disambiguation page in the future, but there is currently only one article,
The page has been moved using the move page feature.

Searches are not case sensitive. There is no need for redirects for a different use of capitals if the text is otherwise identical.

Please note that a redirection should not be used to move/rename a page, as doing so can lose page history. Please see Project:How to rename a page for instructions on how to move/rename a page.

Format

The following text should appear in the edit window:

#REDIRECT [[Target article title]]

Current versions of MediaWiki allow a redirect to point to a section of a larger article:

#REDIRECT [[Target article title#Section of article]]

where the desired section is already marked in the target page with ==Section of article== or (vary rarely) <span id="Section of article"></span>. If the target is a listing in the article (also rare), then the Wikidata id (Qxxxx) from that listing can be used instead of a section heading.

It is possible to just add the redirect line to the beginning of a page and otherwise leave the content alone. This may help a less experienced editor to restart the article based on previous content (which is also available through the history). This may be useful when articles are merged, but a later split is anticipated as the merged article grows.

Effect

When a link is followed to the redirection page, the user is delivered the page contained in the REDIRECT link instead.

Redirects are often made for places which are covered in other articles, such a small village covered by the neighboring town. In cases like this, bold the redirected name in the target article, so users can see why they were sent there: "Seminyak is a town in Bali, which has grown to cover the nearby village of Kerobokan as well."

Troubleshooting

Double redirects

Redirection pages cannot be concatenated. If there are 2 #REDIRECT links in a row, only the first will actually be followed. The second redirect page will be delivered to the user instead of the desired target page. The solution is to point each #REDIRECT directly to the ultimate targeted article, not to another redirect.

For instance, if "Petrograd" becomes "Leningrad" which then becomes "Saint Petersburg" (again), don't use:

Petrograd #REDIRECT Leningrad

Leningrad #REDIRECT Saint Petersburg

but instead:

Petrograd #REDIRECT Saint Petersburg

Leningrad #REDIRECT Saint Petersburg

If St. Petersburg (an abbreviation of the name) is itself a #REDIRECT Saint Petersburg, don't use St. Petersburg as a target for other redirects. It won't work.

A list of these errors is available at Special:DoubleRedirects. Most often, these are redirects to a page which was moved.

Broken redirects

The Special:BrokenRedirects page lists broken redirection links. These are redirects where the target page does not exist.

In some cases, these are simple typos which can be fixed by pointing the redirect to a page which does exist.

Soft redirect

A soft redirect or interwiki redirect is a replacement of usual or "hard" redirects when the destination is another site. Unlike normal redirects, there is nothing special for soft redirects as wiki pages. It's only that soft redirects are very short pages of which all information is the notification to readers, showing the destination in another site to obtain the information they were seeking.

The technique is particularly likely to be used when redirecting users across different Wikimedia projects. Normal redirects would be undesirable in these circumstances, and hard interwiki redirects are disabled. (Reasons: they could not be easily edited without hand-crafting the correct URL; clicking on a link to the redirect page would take you straight to the redirect's target and there would be no "Redirected from ..." message to click, so it would be impossible to return to the redirect page itself; there would also be infinite loop security considerations.)

Soft redirects between different languages should be avoided because they will generally be unhelpful to readers unfamiliar with the destination language.