Help:Redirect
What are redirects?[edit]
A redirect, or a redirect page, is a page that silently diverts the reader from one article name to another. It is a very useful mechanism for article names that are commonly misspelled or abbreviated.
When to use redirects?[edit]
In general, redirect use is encouraged on this wiki. When a search is carried out using the "Go" button (on the wiki sidebar), the search engine will first attempt to find a page that matches that text exactly. Finding the article title typically improves performance if such as page exists. For this reason, you are encouraged to create redirect articles for any situation that speeds up searching, such as:
- Plural terms to singular terms: humans → human
- Names without punctuation to names with punctuation: Fear Me! → "Fear Me!"
- Short forms of names to the complete name: Joko → Palawa Joko
- Abbreviations or initialisms: GW2 → Guild Wars 2
- Extremely common misspellings: Abbadon → Abaddon
- Common spelling variants: armour → armor
- Common names used by players to official terms used by ANet: class → profession
- Old names to new names: Undead Dragon → Zhaitan
- Grammatical derivations: knocked down → knockdown
How to use redirects?[edit]
To create a redirect from one page to another use the following code on the article that you would like the reader to be directed from:
#REDIRECT [[Target article name]]
For example, if you wanted to redirect readers of GW2 to the correctly named article Guild Wars, then you should add the following code to GW2:
#REDIRECT [[Guild Wars 2]]
To change existing redirects just follow the link on the target page to get to the original page without auto-redirect.
What is to be done on redirect targets?[edit]
There are several things to bear in mind for any redirect target (i.e. the page where you get redirected to). Most importantly, the redirect target should not confuse the reader. The content on the redirect target should not prompt the reader to wonder why they got redirected to that page. In other words, the redirection should be logical and the target page should attempt to explain why the reader got redirected, if it would not be otherwise obvious.
Another point to consider is that when choosing a redirect target, avoid choosing a page that is also a redirect itself. A redirect to a redirect would be a case of double redirection, which will not work as expected due to a built-in mechanism that prevents infinite redirection
