I did a redirect the other day. They got after me because there was "no article". So I ended up protecting the redirect. I did write a half-assed article eventually, but did that under duress. I can see no problem having a redirect to a red link, if the redirect is to the best title. When did a red link become an offense, anyway?
Fred
-----Original Message----- From: Phil Sandifer [mailto:Snowspinner@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2007 10:34 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: [WikiEN-l] When did RfD Become Toxic?
Can anyone quickly get me up to speed on when Redirects for Deletion... sorry. Redirects for "discussion" became a toxic hellhole of idiocy that makes the rest of our deletion procedures look sane?
Seriously. People are nominating perfectly sane if misguided redirects for deletion because no articles use them. Things like [[Cammy (Street Fighter)]] are up because there's no other Cammy articles. Which is fine, but someone who doesn't know that and is trying to guess our naming conventions could type in. Similarly, we have people seriously suggesting that [[The Twilight Zone (pinball)]] is not a reasonable redirect for [[Twilight Zone (pinball)]].
Seriously. When did we begin purging redirects, which are possibly the most harmless thing imaginable on Wikipedia. These are not offensive or POV redirects. They're sensible things that people might well guess when trying to type in an article name.
-Phil
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On 7/20/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
I did a redirect the other day. They got after me because there was "no article". So I ended up protecting the redirect. I did write a half-assed article eventually, but did that under duress. I can see no problem having a redirect to a red link, if the redirect is to the best title. When did a red link become an offense, anyway?
Fred
Red links are good, but redirects to red links look like blue links, and thus pretend that an article exists when it really doesn't. Hiding a red link behind a redirect makes the red link useless, as the reader is no longer alerted that an article about the topic is missing. In addition, readers who click on the redirect get a weird redirect page containing a red link, contrary to their usual experience how Wikipedia works. Redirects to non-existing pages are harmful; if you can't even write a poor stub, do not create a redirect.
Kusma